Timeline for How can I prove a word is a noun?
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8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Aug 3, 2015 at 5:35 | comment | added | JEL | @GregLee, thank you. When my attempts to explain the edit to "its" from "it's" failed, even in my own estimation, I had to resort to the negative explanation: "the use is not a contraction of 'it is', which would take an apostrophe". Your Frank example exposes a similarly illuminating but largely inexplicable mystery. | |
| Aug 2, 2015 at 20:31 | comment | added | Greg Lee | @JEL, I don't think it should be called "possessive", since nothing is possessed. I don't see any present-day logical connection between the use of "'s" to express possession and the use here to mark the subject of a nominalized sentence. But I don't think there needs to be such a connection -- compare the use of "for" as a preposition and its quite different use as marking the subject of a for-to nominalization -- "I hate for Frank to eat fish." | |
| Aug 2, 2015 at 17:48 | comment | added | JEL | @GregLee, not to make a chat of this, but have you any further insight into the extraordinary possessive (here, "Frank's")? I ask because of a simple curiosity arising from having been asked to explain the absence of an apostrophe after an edit of "it's" used in this extraordinary possessive sense--and because I found I couldn't readily define or explain the extraordinary possessive sense. | |
| Feb 27, 2015 at 14:27 | comment | added | Greg Lee | "Frank's" in your example might not be genitive. It's the POSS in the POSS-ing complementizer. I don't understand its relation to an ordinary possessive, but it isn't straightforward. Ordinary possessives are definite determiners, but "Frank's" cannot be that -- *"the slowly eating his lobster". | |
| Feb 27, 2015 at 8:36 | comment | added | Edwin Ashworth | Frank's slowly eating his lobster made me feel hungry is grammatical. Are verbs (here, specifically looking at your label for this usage of the ing-form) allowed to be used in genitive constructions in English? I'd say a 'No' answer here is as standard as a 'No' answer to the question 'Are nouns allowed to take direct objects in English?' (And you actually give an unqualified 'Nouns can't have direct objects in English.'). | |
| S Feb 25, 2015 at 9:52 | history | mod moved comments to chat | |||
| S Feb 25, 2015 at 9:52 | comment | added | Andrew Leach♦ | Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. Please go there to comment: further comments here may be deleted. | |
| Feb 18, 2015 at 16:55 | history | answered | Greg Lee | CC BY-SA 3.0 |