Corpora: Apostrophes

[Peter K Tan]

At 19.30 18.12.01 EST, Avryl2 at aol.com wrote:
>Yeah, I agree with Alex.  I cannot imagine that apostrophe use to indicate
possession would ever slip out of use.  In American English, by the way, 's
or a simple ' are both correct for indicating possession with nouns that
end in s. So Williams' and Williams's are both correct, according to which
form makes more sense to you, I guess.
>
Yes, therefore _Bridget Jones's Diary_. I haven't done a corpus search, but
from experience in Singapore and Malaysia, the apostrophe is almost never
left out in simple singular possessives here (so a Singaporean wouldn't
write _St Georges Church_ or _St Andrews Cathedral_ or _Peoples Park_),
although plural possessives or possesives of singular nouns ending in <s>
sometimes pose problems (you might see _Raffles Girl's School_  instead of
_Raffles Girls' School_, or even _St Jame's Kindergarten_ instead of _St
James' [or James's] Kindergarten_). Among less fluent speakers though, the
tendency is not to leave out the apostrophe, but to leave out the
possessive altogether (there is a low-brow bookshop called Popular Bookshop
in Singapore which has a section for _Children Books_).

Someone asked if there was an overgeneralisation of the possessive by
analogy to Chinese _de_.  I've seen this although it might be a case of
hypercorrection. These are generally found when writers attempt a more
formal register, as in student essays - eg _England's king_ is possible in
standard English, but not common.

Cheers,
Peter Tan