Corpora: Apostrophes

[Christopher Bader]

I was pained to see Alex Fang's flame of Simon Smith's thoughtful post.

Alex should read up on language vs. orthography, prescription vs.
description,
and other concepts that are covered in elementary linguistics courses,
before
issuing more flames.

Christopher Bader


-----Original Message-----
From: Alex Chengyu Fang
Sent: Tue 12/18/2001 9:10 AM
To: Simon G. J. Smith; corpora at hd.uib.no
Cc:
Subject: Re: Corpora: Apostrophes



I'm sorry, Simon, but I think you've said a few
incorrect and confusing things:

> I suppose when I referred to the status of 1L and 2L
> English I was thinking more of the language itself
> than its orthographical representation, but it

Can you clarify on this please?

> certainly is interesting that native writers cannot
> agree on apostrophe/letter "s" usage. I went to a

There is indeed some agreement on the use of
apostrophes.

> called "Thomas' Train" (of tank engine fame). If I
> were guided by the pronunciation, I would write
> "Lord Williams' School" and "Thomas's train"; so
> presumably pronunciation has nothing to do with it,
> and the alternatives are in arbitrary free
> variation.

Pronunciation has a lot to do with it. They both
should have a "s's" pronunciation. The correct
treatment of "Williams's" is muffled because of the
clumsy "s's" cluster when followed by "school".

> seems that the correct use of the apostrophe, in
> British English at least, is not as cut and dried as
> one might suppose, so perhaps it is not surprising
> that people do sometimes make mistakes. We manage

So you do think they are mistakes?

> quite satisfactorily without the apostrophe in
> speech, since it serves no disambiguating function;
> I expect eventually it will simply slip out of use.

It does serve some disambiguating function:
"Williams's" is singular and "Williams'" plural.

> 's tend to use that construction; in some such cases
> I think a native speaker would prefer a noun
> compound. Annoyingly, though, I can't think of a
> convincing example.

"Learner dictionary" would be a good example, for both
English and Chinese.


Regards,

Alex


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