Natalie,

Sometimes I find myself speaking out where others may fear to tread, but I will venture an opinion based on some study and reading in diverse sources.  I cannot cite authority, except myself and my view of language.  But sometimes the reason the handbooks don't mention some things is that the authors haven't observed mistakes in that area or don't deem them to be potential problems.  

1) The treatment of "have to" as a modal is not without precedent.  There are "ought to" and "be to" that are usually used wth the infinitive construction in the same way.  Their meanings are modal, telling us how the speaker is oriented toward the factual content.  They admit its hypothetical nature, but allow for it to be factual in certain situations: ideally (ought to), in future (be to), by necessity (have to).  I suppose a rather perverse sentence could be constructed with them all strung together: "Experience ought to be to have to be part of the difference."  This would need context to be interpretable: it wasn't required, but later was anticipated to be required, and still later dropped as a requirement, though there were reasons to have kept it that way.  

2) I think that "Joneses'" is the most correct form.  Sometimes people use "James'" for "James's" and they used to preach that we should say or write "for Jesus' sake" because of the lack of euphony (all the esses).  Arguments that appeal to euphony are usually now considered phony, but it is this sort of thing that may be causing quite a bit of pressure to use the illogical form.  

3) The first version of the plural of the proper noun is correct.  The form of the ending should not be changed.  I suppose it would be akin to calling the Germans "Germen" or the Romans "Romen."  These mistakes would likewise be based on an inaccurate morphological analysis.  I would hope the language never comes to accept such attrocities.  

Bruce

>>> Natalie Gerber <[log in to unmask]> 10/22/07 4:01 AM >>>

Dear all,

The following topics have come up in my grammar course, and I would be grateful for your analyses.

The verb-phrase structure of "Experience had to be part of the difference" (from a sports article): Is "had to" in this case a semi-modal qualifying "be" with "part of the difference" serving as a subject complement and would the voice then be a variant of the conditional or of another form, i.e., "Experience must have been part of the difference"? Or, what seems less intuitive, would you say that "had" is the primary and main verb with a nonfinite object "to be part of the difference"?

The plural possessive forms of proper last names ending in -es, as in Jones? Would the proper form be the Jones's [dog] or the Joneses' [dog]. I suppose what is throwing me in this case is the existence of well-known phrases like "keeping up with the Joneses": are those exceptions based on fixed collocations?

Finally, related to the last question, I have not found in my textbooks (Longman or Hacker) a rule explicating why when proper names end in -y as in Zabrodsky, the plural would be Zabrodskys and not Zabrodskies. If the first analysis is correct, is it then fair to say that the rules for forming plurals have reference to the underlying nominal category? Or am I confusing matters here?

Thanks,

Natalie Gerber
SUNY Fredonia

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