[Gllug] re: grammar

[Pete Ryland]

On Fri, Sep 03, 2004 at 12:48:14PM +0100, Dylan wrote:
> On Friday 03 Sep 2004 12:30 pm, Ian Scott wrote:
> > >  The /-'s/ is only ever acceptable as the posessive marker.
> >
> > Except in it's, where is it NEVER acceptable as the posessive marker!
> 
> Except that here it isn't /-'s/, which is very specifically the 
> morphological suffix for posession (and to be pedantic, NOT genitive.) 
> Neither "it's" nor "its" have a suffix of any kind. "It's" is a 
> contraction of two words, and "its" is a 'synthetic' form which happens 
> to end in an /s/.

To be quite precise, the possessive -'s suffix is indeed actually a
contraction -- for the possesive pronoun.  For example:

John's book is green. == John, his book is green.

Two weeks' worth of rain. == Two weeks, its worth of rain.

Pete
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