joint possessive question
val189
party."
Is it 'your' or 'yours' or 'you' ? Nothing sounds right.
Andreas Waldenburger
I'll venture a guess:
you - Maybe. But only figuratively, ("you" meaning "your shindig") and
only if the sentence ends right there (with Joe out of the picture).
your - Certainly: I'll attend your party and Joe's party, which may
even be the same event.
yours - Sorta: I'll attend Joe's party and yours, but not at the same
time, because they are separate parties. Pitty, that they don't
celebrate their anniversary together, though. ;)
/W
--
My real email address is constructed by swapping the domain with the
recipient (local part).
Lars Eighner
<b4e08d3a-f1cf-4318...@x14g2000yqk.googlegroups.com>, the
lovely and talented val189 broadcast on alt.usage.english:
> The sentence is "I will be glad to attend YOURS and Joe's anniversary
> party."
> Is it 'your' or 'yours' or 'you' ? Nothing sounds right.
Your. When it act as as adjective with an explicit noun (in this case
'anniversary') it is 'your' (my, our, her).
You attend my anniversary, so I will attend yours.
This is because the noun does not occur here. 'Yours' is a pronoun that
stands for 'the thing that belongs to you.' 'Your' is the adjective.
Pronoun Adjective
mine my
(thine) (thy)
ours our
yours your
his his
hers her
its its
The jointness here is not the problem. If you wanted to apply the joint
rule here, it would have to be 'you and Joe's anniversary.' For most people
that is asking too much of the conjunction 'and.' If 'you and Joe' really
are considered together, why wouldn't it just be 'you' -- which can be
plural, in which case the anniversary would be 'your (person spoken to and
Joe) anniversary.' When you speak of you(your/yours) and Joe(Joe's) you
have drawn a distinction between the person spoken to and Joe. The joint
possessive is at odds with that distinction.
--
Lars Eighner <http://larseighner.com/> use...@larseighner.com
6 days since Rick Warren prayed over Bush's third term.
Obama: No hope, no change, more of the same. Yes, he can, but no, he won't.
Chuck Riggs
I analyze compound possessive sentences a piece at a time. Since "I
will be glad to attend your anniversary" is correct, as is "I will be
glad to attend Joe's anniversary", I know that "I will be glad to
attend your and Joe's anniversary" is correct.
--
Regards,
Chuck Riggs
Near Dublin, Ireland
Mark Brader
> party." Is it 'your' or 'yours' or 'you' ? Nothing sounds right.
Nothing is right. You can muddle through in speech by picking "your"
or "you" and people will get what you mean, but in writing, form the
sentence another way.
--
Mark Brader, Toronto "I'd opt for Oz, myself."
m...@vex.net --Buck Henry
Skitt
> val189 wrote:
>> The sentence is "I will be glad to attend YOURS and Joe's
>> anniversary party." Is it 'your' or 'yours' or 'you' ? Nothing
>> sounds right.
>
> Nothing is right. You can muddle through in speech by picking "your"
> or "you" and people will get what you mean, but in writing, form the
> sentence another way.
I agree that the sentence should be formed in another way, possibly omitting
the mention of Joe altogether, as he would certainly be thought of as a
party to the anniversary.
If the question is to be answered with the originally imposed limitations,
the answer is "you".
Some support for that can be found at
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/possessives.htm
under /Compound Possessives/.
--
Skitt (AmE)
Fred
"Chuck Riggs" <chr...@eircom.net> wrote in message
news:1pfun49kuk1l62orn...@4ax.com...
Perhaps "Joe's and your anniversary" sounds better.
Chuck Riggs
wrote:
>Perhaps "Joe's and your anniversary" sounds better.
That is a second decision to make. I agree that it sounds better.
Mark Brader
That's wrong. The 's clitic is not like a Latin genitive inflection.
>> Since "I will be glad to attend your anniversary" is correct,
>> as is "I will be glad to attend Joe's anniversary", I know that
>> "I will be glad to attend your and Joe's anniversary" is correct.
Wrong.
> Perhaps "Joe's and your anniversary" sounds better.
It's wrong too.
Forget "you" for a moment and let's talk about Joe Clark and
Maureen McTeer, because they're famous enough to have web pages
about them where I can look up their dates. Whose anniversary
is June 30? *Joe and Maureen's*. Whose birthdays are June 5
and February 27? *Joe's and Maureen's*. (Hmm, also Joe's and
my father's. I'll have to tell him.)
In other words, if something is jointly possessed by the two
entities joined by "and", the possessive of the whole phrase
must be formed using a single 's clitic. If you make a separate
possessive form for each part, you indicate that there are two
separate possessions. So "your and Joe's" is wrong, whatever
order you write it in.
But "you and Joe's" is also wrong, because pronouns don't form
possessives using 's.
So there is no way to form the desired possessive, as I said
before, and you have to express the sentence another way.
--
Mark Brader | "I can direct dial today a man my parents warred with.
Toronto | They wanted to kill him, I want to sell software to him."
m...@vex.net | -- Brad Templeton
My text in this article is in the public domain.
Athel Cornish-Bowden
>> The sentence is "I will be glad to attend YOURS and Joe's anniversary
>> party." Is it 'your' or 'yours' or 'you' ? Nothing sounds right.
>
> Nothing is right. You can muddle through in speech by picking "your"
> or "you" and people will get what you mean, but in writing, form the
> sentence another way.
I agree. This is a serious deficiency in English (because it's
reaonably frequent that one _needs_ an idiomatic way of handling it),
but there is no solution.
--
athel