Hmmm.  Mulling it over.  How about this:

Everything that was Craig's was piled in the middle of the floor.

This time, I don't think there is an ellipsis, for these two are  
surely not grammatical:

*Everything that was Craig's everything was piled in the middle of the  
floor.
*Everything that was Craig's that was piled in the middle of the floor.

So if "Craig's" is a determiner, that mean it is possible to have a  
determiner that does not have a head noun following?

Peter



On Apr 25, 2008, at 1:48 PM, STAHLKE, HERBERT F wrote:

> Herb's response:
>
> Let me start with a little morphology.  The genitive marker spelled  
> <'s>
> is not a suffix but a clitic.  That means that it's a form that cannot
> stand on its own but attaches to a phrasal constituent rather than  
> to a
> stem.  It's like a suffix in that it must attach to something but  
> unlike
> a suffix in that it doesn't attach to a stem.  Contrast this with the
> plural or third singular suffixes that are identical in pronunciation
> but attach to word stems.  These are inflectional affixes.  The fact
> that we can say, "the chairman of the board's opinion" and we're not
> talking about the board's opinion demonstrates that the genitive is a
> clitic, not a suffix.
>
> That said, what the genitive does syntactically is turn a noun phrase
> into a determiner phrase headed by 's, the genitive clitic.  Because
> it's a determiner phrase, it can have quite a complex internal  
> structure
> while at the same time functioning as a determiner.  As a determiner
> it's distinct from adjectives.  Adjectives cannot come before
> determiners and number words.  Adjectives in a string before a noun  
> have
> some freedom of order.  Determiners don't.  Adjectives can be  
> inflected
> for comparison be compared syntactically using more/most, less/least,
> etc.  Determiners can't be compared at all.
>
> So it has to be a determiner, not an adjective.
>
> Herb
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Peter Adams
> Sent: 2008-04-25 07:01
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Possessive Noun Determiners
>
> I'm wondering about the word class of possessive nouns when they
> appear in the subject complement position:
>
> The car parked in front of my house is Herb's.
>
> Is "Herb's" still a determiner with, perhaps, an understood head noun
> "car"?  Or is it an adjective?
>
> Peter Adams
>
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