I think it is a matter of framing.  If I were to put it mathematically, Romeo and Juliet's grief would be (X + Y)'s grief.  It is that framing that trips us up on the other constructions offered. "My" or "mine" just don't fit within that framing.  That is why they are awkward.  It hasn't so much to do with rules as it has to do with the brain and how it operates.

Most powerful organization of thought seems to benefit from framing.  Without it, we do the best that we can.

Gregg


---- Karl Hagen <[log in to unmask]> wrote: 
> If you want to follow the normal prescriptive rule, I think your stuck with either "my wife's and my," "my and my wife's," or a total rewrite, along the lines Glenda suggests.
> 
> Our instinctive sense that it's wrong, though, suggests that the prescriptive rule of case assignment (what I call "tricklle-down case") may not exactly capture the way English really works.
> 
> Descriptively, I think you would be most likely to hear "me and my wife's grief," apart from those who have so internalized the prescriptive pattern that they avoid "me and X" as a matter of course.
> 
> I believe what's happening here is that the genitive marker attaches not to the word but to the phrase/coordination (cf., "the duchess of York's dress"--it's the duchess who has the dress, not York; similarly, "Romeo and Juliet's love"). What we really have, therefore, is a coordination marked with the genitive:
>  [[pronoun] & NP]'s, and the way English really works in such instances is to stick with the default, objective case for the pronoun. Note that you can also find people using the pattern [NP & me]'s, which lends support to my hypothesis about where the genitive marker tends to attach.
> 
> Karl
> 
> On Aug 17, 2013, at 7:14 PM, Geoffrey Layton wrote:
> 
> > I keep wanting to raise this question to the list, but somehow never have a good example at the time I think of it, but I just ran into an example that presents an excellent case of the problem of I guess what could be called a "double possessive" - where a noun and a pronoun are both used as possessives.
> >  
> > Here it is: "Words cannot describe my wife's and my grief" (from a news article). This construction has always struck me as exceedingly awkward, and my grammar instinct tells me it should have a solution based on another construction, but it escapes me.
> >  
> > Suggestions anybody? Or am I just being overly picky?
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