Corpora: Apostrophes

[Lou Burnard]

In France a few years ago there was a passing fad for collecting little
lapel badges, which were usually referred to as "pin's". I have always
understood this to indicate that the word should be pronounced in an
"english" manner, e.g. as "peenz", rather than with a nasal vowel as the
spelling "pins" would otherwise require, thus distinguishing the word
from that used to describe pine trees.

But what it also suggests is that (in this context at least) the "'s"
suffix is seen at least by anglophone French speakers as a useful piece of
orthographic flummery which can be deployed for arbitrary non-syntactic
purposes. It's an orthographic variation available for whatever purpose
you please, like all those accents and diacritics that 17th century
grammarians peppered the French language with.

It's a distinction, in short, in search of a difference. What I find
interesting is why it should be features of this kind that prescriptivists
and others anxious to tie down the tail of language seize on. Why should
we care so much about distinguishing "it's" and "its" but not give a toss
about distinguishing any number of other homophones? Why don't we have
separate spellings for "that" as a relative and "that" as an article, even
though they are clearly distinguished in the speech of most English
speakers?

Might the answer be that this is actually quite an easy distinction to
teach, but that it requires prior acquisition of some basic linguistic
concepts  (case, number) not generally available? So it becomes a useful
way of both expressing and reinforcing the concerns of an elite.

With which untenable proposition, I wish all readers of the corpora list a
pleasant holiday!

Lou