4.5 • 2.9K Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 2012
⏱️ 7 minutes
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0:00.0 | Grammar girl here, lately some readers and listeners have had questions about the possessive |
0:05.4 | form in English. Sometimes it comes up as a question about where or whether to use an |
0:10.6 | apostrophe. For example, I did a blog post about the apostrophe and expressions like two |
0:16.1 | weeks' notice. In one commenter wrote, quote, there is no possessive in two weeks' notice. |
0:22.1 | The notice doesn't belong to the two weeks. It should actually be two weeks of notice. |
0:29.4 | Although I regularly get comments and questions from people who think phrases like two weeks' |
0:34.4 | notice aren't possessive, the truth is there is a possessive in expressions like two weeks' |
0:40.1 | notice or a year's pay. The idea that there isn't has to do with a renaming that happened |
0:46.3 | in the 1700s. That's when Grammarian Robert Loth decided to rename the grammatical cases in |
0:52.4 | English. But before I talk about that, I should explain what grammatical cases are in the first |
0:58.0 | place. They're not leather-bound containers for your grammar books and dictionaries. |
1:03.4 | Grammatical case is a feature of a noun that shows the noun's function in a phrase. For the |
1:10.4 | most part, present-day English doesn't mark grammatical case. However, it does mark case |
1:15.7 | on pronouns. When we say that the pronouns I and we are used for subjects, while me and |
1:22.4 | us are used for objects, we're talking about case. I and we are in the subjective case, and me |
1:29.4 | and us are in the objective case. English also has one more case, the possessive. My and hour |
1:37.6 | are in the possessive case. And unlike the other cases, the possessive case still exists not only |
1:44.3 | for pronouns, but for almost every noun, including proper nouns and common nouns. Here's an example |
1:50.9 | of each all-in-one phrase. Ardvark's mother's birthday. Ardvark's and mothers are both in the possessive |
1:59.0 | case. So as for the renaming business a few hundred years ago, instead of subjective and objective, |
2:06.6 | English grammarians used the terms nominative and accusative, because that's what the nearest |
2:12.9 | equivalents in Latin were called. The nearest Latin case to what we now call the possessive was |
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