Saxon genitive

In English language teaching, the term "Saxon genitive" is used to associate the possessive use of the apostrophe (the commonly-termed "apostrophe s") with the historical origin in Anglo Saxon (also known as Old English) of the morpheme that it represents. The Saxon genitive is one of the ways in modern English of forming a genitive construction, along with the preposition "of".

The 's morpheme originated in Old English as an inflexional suffix marking genitive case. In the modern language, it can be often be attached to the end of an entire phrase (as in "The King of Spain's wife" or "The man who you met yesterday's bicycle"). As a result, it is normally viewed by linguists as a clitic, i.e. a morpheme that cannot be a word by itself but is grammatically independent of the word it is attached to, as in forms such as 'm (as in I'm) or n't (as in don't). ^[1]

A similar form of the morpheme existed in the Germanic ancestor of English, and exists in some modern Germanic languages. The spelling with an apostrophe is unique to English.

The English possessive

Modern English spelling marks the genitive (or possessive) singular case as follows:

	Regular noun not ending in "s"	Regular noun ending in "s"	Irregular noun
Singular	-’s (e.g. cat's)	-’s or -’ (e.g. class's, goodness')	-’s (e.g. child's, ox's, mouse's)
Plural	-s' (e.g. cats')	-es' (e.g. classes', goodnesses')	-'s (e.g. children's, oxen's, mice's)

The final -s spelling of the personal possessive pronouns his, hers, ours, yours, theirs is not felt to represent a possessive morpheme. For this reason the words are spelled without apostrophes. However, the impersonal one is felt to combine with a possessive morpheme, so that the spelling one's is used. The possessive determiner corresponding to it is an object of widespread confusion. Standard practice is to use the spelling its, and to reserve the spelling it's for the contraction of it is or it has.

Development

In Old English, -es was the ending of the genitive singular of most strong declension nouns and the masculine and neuter genitive singular of strong adjectives. The ending -e was used for strong nouns with Germanic ō-stems, which constituted most of the feminine strong nouns, and for the feminine genitive singular form of strong adjectives.^[2]

Gender	Singular	Plural
Strong masculine	-es	-a
Weak masculine	-an	-ena
Strong feminine	-e	-a
Weak feminine	-an	-ena
Strong neuter	-es	-a
Weak neuter	-an	-ena

In Middle English the -es ending was generalised to the genitive of all strong declension nouns. By the sixteenth century, the remaining strong declension endings were generalised to all nouns. The spelling -es remained, but in many words the letter -e- no longer represented a sound. In those words, printers often copied the French practice of substituting an apostrophe for the letter e. In later use, -'s was used for all nouns where the /s/ sound was used for the possessive form, and the -e- was no longer omitted. Confusingly, the -'s form was also used for plural noun forms. These were derived from the strong declension -as ending in Old English. In Middle English, the spelling was changed to -es, reflecting a change in pronunciation, and extended to all cases of the plural, including the genitive. Later conventions removed the apostrophe from subjective and objective case forms and added it after the -s in possessive case forms. See Apostrophe: Historical development

In the Early Modern English of 1580 to 1620 it was sometimes spelled as "his" as a folk etymology, e.g. "St. James his park"; see his genitive.

Grammatical status as clitic, suffix or case ending

Historically, the possessive morpheme represented by the spelling -'s was a case marker attached to a noun denoting the possessor. It is often referred to as a case ending or suffix. In Modern English the marker may be attached to the final noun in a noun phrase when that noun is not the actual possessor, for example the King of Norway's daughter. In the traditional ballad Sir Patrick Spens, an earlier construction is preserved: the King's dochter of Noroway. It has been argued that without capitalization, noun phrases such as "the king of Spain’s hat" are ambiguous between "the hat of the king of Spain" or "the king of the hat of Spain".^[1] Older usage had "the king’s hat of Spain" or, rarely, "Spain's king's hat". This separation from the head noun possessor is possible even when the noun is in a subordinate clause, for example "the man (whom) you met yesterday's bicycle",^[1] which is not ambiguous. This is rewordable as "the bicycle of the man (whom) you met yesterday" or "the bicycle belonging to the man (whom) you met yesterday."

Because the 's ending is separable from the head noun, it is standardly analyzed by linguists as a clitic. Traditional grammarians are sometimes uncomfortable with this, because they tend to view English grammar through the lens of classical languages like Latin and Ancient Greek. A single linguistic paper by Payne and Huddleston makes a similar argument.^[3]

Mention in style guides

Some respected style guides such as The Chicago Manual of Style recommend the more modern addition of an s when forming the singular regular possessive of a noun ending in "s" but specifically state that adding simply an apostrophe (eg. Jesus') is also correct.^[4]

The Elements of Style and the Canadian Press Stylebook hold that the s is mandatory with only two exceptions: classical and Biblical proper names (e.g. "Jesus' teachings", "Augustus' guards") and common phrases that do not take the s (e.g. "for goodness' sake"). In all other cases, it is incorrect to omit the s.^[5][6]

See also

• English personal pronouns
• Possessive adjective

References

1. ^ ^{a b c} Is the English Possessive 's Truly a Right-Edge Phenomenon?
2. ^ Campbell, A. Old English Grammar. Oxford University Press. Oxford 1959. Chapter IX
3. ^ Payne, John & Rodney Huddleston. 2002. Nouns and noun phrases. In Rodney Huddleston & Geoffrey K. Pullum (eds.), The Cambridge grammar of the English language, 323–523. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-43146-8. (Relevant section is pp. 479–481.)
4. ^ The Chicago Manual of Style
5. ^ The Elements of Style
6. ^ The Canadian Press Stylebook, 14th Edition. ISBN 978-0-920009-42-0.