Johanna:

English possessives are possessives of entire noun phrases, not just of 
nouns, and we add the apostrophe + s to the end of the phrase; for example, 
we say "the Queen of England's horses" rather than "the Queen's of England 
horses."  So it's brothers-in-law's.

Dick Veit



At 09:51 AM 10/25/2000 -0800, you wrote:
>One of my students stumped me in class yesterday. We were discussing
>apostrophe use, and she asked how one would punctuate the possessive
>plural of 'brother-in-law', assuming 'brother' carries the plural marker.
>
>Brothers'-in-law        looks terrible to me, but
>brothers-in-law's       looks no better.
>
>I think this example is a good argument for shifting the plural to
>'brother-in-laws' (I'm kidding, actually, 'brother-in-laws' sounds wrong
>to me).
>
>What do you all think?
>
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>Johanna Rubba   Assistant Professor, Linguistics
>English Department, California Polytechnic State University
>One Grand Avenue  • San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
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