>Even other determiners would need pragmatic disambiguation to go through:

I drank from Craig's cup and the baby from hers.

[If the baby were a girl and no other girls were present, okay.  If other
girls or women were present, context would have to disambiguate --]
assisted by pointing perhaps.]

I drank from Craig's cup and the baby from his.

[If the baby were a boy and the context made it plain that you were
referring to the baby -- e.g. by pointing -- okay.  If other males were
present as well as Craig, again context would have to be brought in to avoid
ambiguity.]

'Yours' (singular) is safe:  you are not Craig.   'Ours', 'theirs' and
plural 'yours' are unlikely because multiple ownership of cups is unlikely!

Edmond  



Dr. Edmond Wright
3 Boathouse Court
Trafalgar Road
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CB4 1DU
England

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 Notice that in the list that Craig made the word "its" is missing.  This
> "determiner" cannot be used by itself.
> 
> *I drank from Craig's cup and the baby from its.
> 
> Maybe this is all right for some people, but it seems strange to me.
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "STAHLKE, HERBERT F" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Friday, April 25, 2008 5:52 PM
> Subject: Re: Possessive Noun Determiners
> 
> 
> There's a problem with universal quantifiers.  If you replace
> "everything" with a specific noun phrase like "pile of clothes," then
> you get
> 
> The pile of clothes that was Craig's pile of clothes was piled in the
> middle of the floor.
> 
> and, of course,
> 
> The pile of clothes that was Craig's was piled in the middle of the
> floor.
> 
> A little redundant and inelegant, but perfectly grammatical.  But you
> also get other determiners as NPs, like "This is what I was talking
> about."  So yes it is possible to delete the N' that the determiner
> serves as specifier for.
> 
> Ellipsis must apply to whole constituents, and the N', which is what you
> get from an NP (N'') when you take off the determiner, is a constituent.
> This, by the way, is one of the facts of noun phrases that traditional
> grammar and RK diagramming have trouble expressing.
> 
> 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 16:02
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Possessive Noun Determiners
> 
> 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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