Timeline for What is the possessive of "you guys"?
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6 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jul 24, 2014 at 16:35 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | Mmmmnope, not really. Ah well. I’ll live. Bons mots is fine, ’cause there’s a logical reason (albeit in a different language) for it. It’s similar to how in Danish, the possessive of hvem “who” is more and more frequently hvems “who’s” rather than hvis “whose”, and then the phrase Hvis er det? “Whose is this?” has the audacity to be quite unreasonably warped into Hvemses er detses? “Who’s’s is this’s’s”, with no less than two double possessives tacked on—one of them to a word that has absolutely no business being in the possessive to begin with. Madness! | |
| Jul 24, 2014 at 16:31 | comment | added | Micah Walter | Hmm, does it feel better to think of your as the pronoun and guys’ as a particle implying plurality? | |
| Jul 24, 2014 at 16:25 | comment | added | Micah Walter | It is a single pronominal unit that happens to inflect in both its parts. Think of it like bon mot, which can be bons mots in the plural. Don’t worry about how it works; it just does :) It’s a pronoun, it can afford to act exceptionally. | |
| Jul 24, 2014 at 16:23 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | Well, that’s just bizarre and un-English! Interlexemic inflection … what is this, Finnish? ;-) | |
| Jul 24, 2014 at 16:13 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | I’ve always found your guys’ quite bizarre. My guys’? I don’t own any guys (that I know of, at least). It’s like treating you guys as a transparent collocation of pronoun and noun, but then giving it a possessive form that doesn’t fit with how pronouns and nouns collocate in this manner after all! After all, nobody—to my knowledge—would say that the possessive of you people and you children is your people’s and your children’s. To me, you guys is simply a single pronominal unit with a plural /z/, and it therefore has no morphological possessive. | |
| Jul 24, 2014 at 15:33 | history | answered | Micah Walter | CC BY-SA 3.0 |