| 词组 | double genitive |
| 释义 | double genitive Almost every native speaker of English has read or heard expressions like these: • ... that place of Dorothy Thompson's is only sixty miles away —Alexander Woollcott, letter, 18 Mar. 1940 • ... two very nice girls who were friends of yours — Flannery O'Connor, letter, 9 Apr. 1960 The most noticeable thing about "place of Dorothy Thompson's" and "friends of yours" is that the possessive relationship is marked both by the preposition of and the genitive inflection. This construction is known as the double genitive or double possessive. It is an idiomatic construction of long standing in English—going back at least to Chaucer's time—and should be of little interest except to learners of the language, because, as far as we know, it gives native speakers no trouble whatsoever. But the double genitive was discovered by the 18th-century grammarians and has consequently been the subject of considerable speculation, explanation, and other (sometimes disapproving) comment. Before we examine the history of comment on the construction, let us take a look at the construction itself. The genitive in English has more functions than the simple indication of possession (see the article at genitive). The double genitive construction is a characteristic that separates the possessive genitive from all other functions of the genitive. Here is how the matter is typically explained: "Jane's picture," out of context, can be considered ambiguous. If Jane's is an objective genitive, we can clear up the possible confusion by using the of construction: "a picture of Jane." If the picture belongs to Jane, and Jane's is a possessive genitive, using the of construction, we get "a picture of Jane's." In other words, when of is used with a possessive genitive, the noun or pronoun regularly retains its genitive inflection. No native speaker of English would write our first example as "that place of Dorothy Thompson." The double genitive is a perfectly acceptable, perfectly normal form in modern English. But those 18th-century grammarians weren't so sure. Lowth 1762 may have been the first to notice it. In his discussion of the possessive, he runs afoul of "a soldier of the king's." He seems to have mulled it over awhile; he begins by conceding that sometimes both the's and of may be used, but then adds—apparently as the idea strikes him—that "here are really two possessives; for it means 'one of the soldiers of 'the king.'" The treatment of Priestley 1798 is fuller than Lowth's, and he is the first to use the picture example, pointing out the difference between "this picture of my friend" and "this picture of my friend's." Lindley Murray 1795 bases his treatment on Priestley. He is clearly unhappy with the construction and with the designation double genitive (which Priestley had used). He seems somewhat relieved to be able to repeat Priestley's statement that where the double genitive is not necessary to distinguish the sense (as in the picture example), it is generally avoided, "especially in a grave style" of writing. Murray also adds that some grammarians advised avoiding the construction altogether. One of them was James Buchanan, who in A Regular English Syntax (1767) wrote, "Of being the sign of the Genitive Case, we cannot put it before a Noun with ('s) for this is "making two Genitives" (cited in Leonard 1929). The 18th-century grammarians simply had a horror of anything double, because such constructions did not occur in Latin. Lowth's explanation is of interest only because it survived into the 20th century. His "one of the soldiers" construction is what later grammarians called a partitive genitive. The partitive explanation was adopted because it avoided the idea of the possessive duplicated. In the third volume of his Grammar (1909-1949) and in S.P.E. Tract No. XXV (1926), Otto Jespersen seems to have finally disposed of the partitive explanation. It could have been exploded by anyone who happened to try it out on Priestley's example with a pronoun. His example comes from the first volume of Tristram Shandy (1759): "This exactness of his." Try it for yourself. Jespersen cites another historical grammarian, L. Kellner, in his edition of Caxton's Blanchardyn ( 1890), as having established the development of the construction in three stages: first, possession with possessive pronoun; second, with possessive case of the noun; and third, with an extended sense of possession (as in "that beard of thine") that we still use today. We close with a few examples of the extended use: • ... a good friend of my father's —Heywood Hale Broun (spoken), 18 Dec. 1985 • ... many a guest of ours inside the house at Seaforth —James Thurber, letter, 23 June 1955 • They grump now, with some justification, that Serbia's political leaders are the most mediocre of any of the republics' —David Binner, N. Y. Times Mag., 25 Dec. 1983 • ... a favorite phrase of your delighted mother's — Emily Dickinson, letter, 1 Oct. 1851 |
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