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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