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 To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/