| 词组 | genitive |
| 释义 | genitive 1. There are informative discussions of the genitive case in Fries 1940, Evans 1957, and Roberts 1954, and undoubtedly in many other sources. Our brief overview will be based chiefly on these three, with many examples taken from one or another of them. The genitive case comes in two forms for nouns: an inflected form marked by an apostrophe and an 5 ('s) or sometimes just an apostrophe at the end of the noun, and a periphrastic form with the preposition of. The personal pronouns have a set of forms (my, our, your, his, her, their) that are the equivalent of the genitive of nouns (some analysts consider them adjectives). Bishop Lowth in 1762 used the word possessive in place of the older term genitive; so then did other 18th-century grammarians, and many grammarians since have used it. This change in terminology has led to a few minor usage problems based on the erroneous supposition that the only function of the genitive is to show possession (see section 2 below). The only statistical investigation of the genitive that we are aware of can be found in Fries 1940. Fries found that the possessive genitive was the most common, but that it accounted for only 40 percent of all genitives. The other 60 percent was split up among various functions. We summarize a number of these here. The categories are not universally agreed upon—a characteristic that you may have noticed is one of the banes of grammatical study—and a single category may be given different names by different analysts. Subjective genitive and genitive of origin. Fries lumps these together, but Roberts separates them. Together they make up 29 percent of Fries's examples: • his mother's request Leroy's dancing the general's letter Shakespeare's plays Objective genitive or object genitive. These make up 17 percent of Fries's count. Roberts notes that object genitives tend to modify nouns denoting some sort of action: • contributed toward the family's support my son's discharge Caesar's murderers Descriptive genitive or classifying genitive. Fries adds the genitive of measure to this: • the room's furnishings the airplane's speed the building's foundation one day's leave a dollar's worth a year's wages the Eighty Years' War Evans singles out some descriptive genitives which he labels the genitive of purpose: men's shirts a girls' school Evans points out that the periphrastic form of these genitives of purpose is made with the preposition for, rather than of: shirts for men a school for girls There are other genitives that receive occasional recognition. One of these is the idiomatic form known as the group genitive, which is characterized by the placement of the's at the end of a descriptive phrase: • The King of England's army The Department of Science's Antarctic division According to Baron 1982, although Bishop Lowth found such constructions acceptable, Noah Webster in 1784 did not. There seems to be no recent controversy involving the construction. Roberts also mentions an appositive genitive, which is always periphrastic in form: • the city of San Francisco the state of Wyoming the fine art of flattery the title of treasurer This outline of the functions of the genitive, brief and incomplete though it is, shows how misleading it is to think of the genitive in English as showing only possession. 2. Genitive with inanimate nouns. Look at this list of phrases: • the nation's capital • a week's pay • a dollar's worth • a stone's throw • the Hundred Years' War • land's end • on a winter's night In each of the phrases the noun in the possessive case stands for something inanimate. One of the curious things about these constructions is that a considerable number of 19th-century grammarians reasoned themselves into believing that they did not exist or were wrong. Some 20th-century commentators—Follett 1966, for instance—still think they are wrong. And why? Because you are not supposed to be able to attribute possession to something inanimate. The argument is a case of fooling oneself with one's own terminology. After the 18th-century grammarians began to refer to the genitive case as the possessive case, grammarians and other commentators got it into their heads that the only use of the case was to show possession. But not one of the examples in the list is a possessive genitive; they are subjective or objective or descriptive genitives, as described in section 1 above. And they are all perfectly standard. Simply changing the name of the genitive does not change or eliminate any of its multiple functions. The choice between the's form and the phrasal form with of should be determined by the sound of the sentence. • ... at half an hour's notice —Henry James, The American, 1877 • All the movie's Texans ... keep their word —Time, 21 Jan.1952 • ... trailer parks right up to the water's edge —James Jones, Holiday, July 1952 • ... the whales, as though to divide the sea's food resources among them —Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us, 1951 • One of the veranda's functions —Frank Sullivan, The Night the Old Nostalgia Burned Down, 1953 • ... the importance of science's carefully tested finding —Arthur Holly Compton, Key Reporter, February 1952 • Around the chimney's base the roof looked eroded —Doris Lessing, The Good Terrorist, 1985 • ... the best known of central Kentucky's Bluegrass farms —Boyd Keenan, Key Reporter, August 1952 • ... one of Napa Valley's most respected producers —advt, Town & Country, November 1987 3. There is mixed usage with regard to indicating the genitive case of a singular noun ending in an \\\\s\\\\ or \\\\z\\\\ sound with an apostrophe plus s or an apostrophe alone. Our evidence shows that for common nouns more writers use's than the apostrophe alone: the boss's desk, the princess's wedding are more common than the boss' desk, the princess' wedding. But when a polysyllabic s or z noun is followed by a word beginning with an s or z sound, the apostrophe alone is more frequent: for convenience' sake. This same basic observation can be made of proper nouns: Jones's house, Dickens's novels art more common than Jones' house, Dickens' novels. There are more exceptions with proper names, however: Jesus' time, Moses' law. Multisyllabic names and particularly those of biblical and classical origin usually take only the apostrophe: Odysseus' journey, Aristophanes' plays. Single-syllable names, however, even the classical ones, more often have's: Zeus's anger. 4. See also apostrophe 2, 4; double genitive; possessive with gerund. |
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