Discussion Groups / ESL Teaching / July 2004

Mxsmanic wrote on 25 Jul 2004:

"The house of John" is unnatural English unless it is being used to
name a business or a dynastic place, eg, the House of Usher.
Otherwise, it always has to be "John's house", unless it is in a
structure like "The house of John's that I am referring to is the one
he owns in Miami Beach, not the one he rents there".

The rule that Michael Swan gives in _Practical English Usage_ is that
"we cannot usually put a possessive before another determiner and a
noun. We can say 'my friend', 'Ann's friend' or 'that friend', but
not 'a my friend' or 'that Ann's friend'[1]. Instead, we use a
structure with 'of' + 'possessive'."

"That policeman is a friend of mine." This is one of Swan's examples.
It differs stylistically from "That policeman is my friend" and can
differ in focus, but, other than a desire for brevity, I honestly
can't think of why I'd use one form rather than the other without a
specific context.

"Have you heard this new idea of the boss's?" is another of his
examples. This seems to me to have a different tone from "Have you
heard the boss's new idea?" The first one suggests to me that the
speaker is criticising the idea, while the second seems less
judgmental, but context will always have a significant bearing on
this kind of nuance.

"He watched each gesture of hers as if she were a stranger" is
another. This seems to put more emphasis on *her* gestures than would
"He watched each of her gestures as if she were a stranger". It also
seems to imply that he singled out her gestures and ignored the
gestures of someone else. But without a context, it's hard to be
certain.

I would almost always prefer the possessive-as-determiner structure
over the possessive-with-of structure for brevity and informality and
would tend to use the latter structure for mor formal writing or
situations in which I wanted to draw more attention to the thing
possessed rather than to the possessor, eg, "That car of John's is a
real gas hog" puts the focus more on the car than does "John's car is
a real gas hog".

I don't know if this is very helpful. I hope it is.

[1] "That Ann's friend" is okay if the "that" is used as a
contrastive with "not this Ann's friend", though.

Sometimes where you get possessives of possessives it can get confusing, and
it's better to use an of construction for one of the possessives.

It's hard to think of a good but convoluted example.

John's house's guttering's bracket was broken.
vs
The bracket of the guttering *on* John's house was broken.

By changing one of the possessives to a preposition breaking the two
possessives, and using different possessive forms each side of that break,
the monotony of three consecutive and similarly-formed possessives is
relieved. This is style rather than grammar, however.

Another example is where confusion might arise:

John's cat's fur blanket was worn.
The fur blanket of John's cat was worn.
John's cat's-fur blanket was worn. (using a hyphen to link fur with cat, not
with blanket)
John's blanket of cat fur was worn.

I'm sure others can think of better examples.

Owain