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I follow a Facebook Duolingo group and a Polish speaking person learning English shared an error they felt was incorrect. The sentence was ‘the Prince is getting excited’ and they wrote ‘the Prince’s getting excited’. They were marked wrong for their answer and I agreed it was grammatically wrong because it just sounds wrong in English. But I can’t find an explanation for why this should be.

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  • What's “grammatically” wrong with it? You understand that grammar’s got nothin’ t’ do with spelling ’n’ punctuation, right?
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented Oct 22 at 20:57
  • prince's is a possessive; it does not mean "prince is". The prince's falcon.
    – TimR
    Commented Oct 22 at 21:38
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    A few examples of "the prince's" where it is inescapable that a contraction rather than a Saxon genitive is in play can be found on the internet, but they're not convincing, and neither is their frequency. There are far more hits for "the man's going". This is a matter of idiomaticity (what actually gets used) rather than grammaticality (what follows or usually follows accepted rules or at least rules of thumb). And as Peter says, the contracted form adds little [but arguably ugliness].
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Oct 22 at 22:01
  • I can find examples like "my brother's getting excited", "the boy's getting faster" online but mostly in very informal things (tweets, social media etc). Although The Guardian does have "My sister's getting married", and a journal article discussing a comedy performance quotes "my mother's getting divorced". I'd still say it's very informal though.
    – Stuart F
    Commented Oct 23 at 10:04
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    @StuartF I think you've missed the central point. Everyone knows, I think, that you can , all other things being equal, contract the verb be with a preceding common or proper noun. However, thing's aren't equal in this case. The issue here is that the use of apostrophe+s for is or has indicates a loss of a syllable. However, the rules of English don't allow for a contraction (i.e for syllable loss) when the preceding consonant is a sibilant, as is the case with prince. And thusly "prince's" is not a representation of a contracted prince is in English.
    – Araucaria - Him
    Commented Oct 23 at 12:24

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The reason that we don't write "prince's" for "prince is" is that "prince's" sounds almost exactly like "prince is", so there's very little point in using this contraction when speaking. And because we don't use the contraction in spoken English, we don't use it in written English, either.

The same is true for words that end in /s/, /z/, /ʃ/, /ʒ/, /tʃ/ and /dʒ/.

I wouldn't call this rule grammar; maybe it should be called spelling.

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    I'm not absolutely sure whether this is grammar related or not. The spelling issue relates to contraction (genuine contraction as opposed to negative inflection, for example) which seems to sit at the interface between phonology and grammar. For example "Peter's going" is fine but "I am taller than Peter's" isn't. That's not about spelling. OP's question seems to be phonology related - but is whether a contraction is possible or not also part of the grammar? - dunno (shrugs).
    – Araucaria - Him
    Commented Oct 23 at 14:36
  • What about princesses (plural / feminine) and princesses'... grammatically, it seems correct to me, yet you have no idea whether it's plural, feminine, possessive, whatnot...
    – Alexis Wilke
    Commented Oct 24 at 14:49

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