A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

110 Chapter 5 Nouns and noun phrases

available. Her letter might be the letter she wrote or the letter she received, and
there are other possibilities available in special contexts. In the context of a language­
teaching class, for example, it could be the letter that has been assigned to her to
translate.

9.2 Other uses of the genitive

Genitive case is also used in the following constructions:

[63] SUBJECT

ii FUSED HEAD

iii OBLIQUE

She didn 't approve of [his being given a second chance].

They accepted Kim 's proposal but not Pa t's.

iv PREDICATIVE

V ATTRIBUTIVE

The argument was sparked by a casual remark of Kim 'so

Everything in this room is Mary's.

They've just moved to an old people's home.

.. In formal style the subject of a gerund-participial clause that is functioning as

complement (of a verb or preposition) appears in genitive case, as in [i].

• Like most other determiners, a genitive can fuse with the head, as in [ii], under­
  stood as "Pat's proposal".


• The oblique genitive occurs as complement to of in a post-head dependent. Note
  the contrast between a casual remark of Kim 's in [iii], which is marked as indef­
  inite by the article a, and Kim 's casual remark, which is marked as definite by the
  genitive subject-determiner.


• The predicative genitive functions as complement of be, become, etc., and here
  it does indicate possession, as in [iv].


• The attributive genitive functions as internal modifier in NP structure. Note that
  in [v] an is determiner to the larger nominal (old people's home), not the genitive
  one (old people's); this contrasts with [60iia] above.

Exercises

1. Write out or type the following passage
   (it's the opening paragraph of the preface
   to Steven Pinker's book The Language
   Instinct) with the nouns underlined and the
   NPs enclosed in square brackets. (Don't
   forget that one NP can occur within another:
   in a phrase like I met the fa ther of the bride,
   for example, the bride is an NP within the
   larger NP the father of the bride, so you
   would write [the/other of [the bridell.)
   J have never met a person who is not inter­
   ested in language. J wrote this book to try to
   satisfy that curiosity. Language is beginning
   to submit to that uniquely satisfying kind of

understanding that we call science, but the

news has been kept a secret.

2. There are a number of nouns that are

plural-only in some of their senses, but not

in all. For example:

PLURAL-ONLY

ORDINARY

Eat more greens.

Those greens don't match.

For the first nine of the following give two

examples containing the word in an appro­

priate context, one where it has its plural­

only sense, and one where it is an ordinary

plural with a contrasting singular form. For

the last item, people, give one example