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Friday, May 3, 2013

Possessive Pronouns Do Not Contain Apostrophes

A noun, proper or common, when turned possessive requires an apostrophe. The book belonging to Mary becomes "Mary's book," and the cover of the book is referred to more succinctly as "the book's cover." This is the source of the confusion.

But possessive pronouns work differently. We might say (colloquially, allowing ourselves to end our sentence with a preposition) that possession is already what such pronouns are all about. The word my, for example, does not by itself indicate anyone (such as Mary) or anything (such as a book) but always accompanies a noun and is understood to refer to that noun. Thus no apostrophe is needed.

Here are some examples:

My book

Our hope

Your phone

His laptop

Her notebook

Its appearance

Their agenda

If we make the nouns plural, those plural forms do not contain apostrophes, either: books, hopes, phones, laptops, notebooks, appearances, agendas.

Subject-verb contractions are a different kettle of fish. When we contract (pull in together and make smaller) the following subjects and verbs, the results require -- guess what! -- apostrophes!

I + am = I'm
You + are = You're
It + is = It's
Etc.

Therefore,

You're [You are] going to bring your agenda [the agenda belonging to you or made up by you] to the meeting.

It's [It is] going to run long if we don't respect its [the meeting's] time limit.



1 comment:

dmarks said...

Its clear what you say, but I aint not going to argue. Your on top of this subject, already.