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In other words, are sentences like

We had a party at Jane's, who is my cousin.

or

He pressed his face up to Kate's, who flattened herself against the wall.

grammatically correct?

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4
  • I consider that It's ok, actually it's the way in which I use 'who'.
    – Castiblanco
    Commented May 7, 2013 at 12:07
  • 5
    Wasn't there some big flap about just this kind of sentence on the SATs or GREs a few years ago? Who's a relative pronoun in those two Ss, but RelPros don't replace ADJs (the names function as ADJs, not noun phrases) but NPs. They're probably ungrammatical because the ADJs are elided NPs: Jane's house & Kate's face. Jane's house ain't your cousin & Kate's face didn't flatten itself against the wall. I'd say that both require a full sentence: Jane's my cousin & Kate flattened herself against the wall. But I need a professional linguist to judge their grammaticality. I don't know.
    – user21497
    Commented May 7, 2013 at 12:36
  • I completely agree it JARS in my eyes :) - Change face for sister and you will understand it was the sister who flattened herself
    – mplungjan
    Commented May 7, 2013 at 13:55
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    Bill's right. They're ungrammatical because the pronoun refers to the full NP, not just the possessive.
    – John Lawler
    Commented May 7, 2013 at 15:33

1 Answer 1

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I agree with Bill that, if the phrases were not elided, they would be ungrammatical. However, However, because these sentences do have elision, I would consider them correct, especially since the relative clause is additional information offset by a comma, and not important information vital to the meaning of the sentence. In addition, phrases like these are common, therefore I would argue acceptable.

  1. We had a party at Jane's, who is my cousin. - Correct
  2. We had a party at Jane's house, who is my cousin. - Incorrect
  3. We had a party at Jane's house. Jane is my cousin. - Correct
  4. We had a party at Jane's house. She is my cousin. - Grammatically correct, but seems illogically ordered unless spoken with stress on SHE.
  5. We had a part at my cousin Jane's house. - Best sentence.
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1
  • I found a number of sentences like these in COCA. For example Her gaze meets Helen's , who, misconstruing the situation, makes an "OK" sign... or We all got new dresses prettier than Princess Elizabeth's , who was going to become queen as my sister married. Correct or not, they seem to appear even in edited texts.
    – RainbowDash
    Commented May 10, 2013 at 15:23

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