Re 'possessive' apostrophes: Bill McCleary is right about insisting that
academic standards be age-appropriate. Unfortunately, we don't know the
appropriate age for teaching a lot of items. Without further research,
we will remain in the dark.

I also believe that we should insist on the inclusion of experts in
language acquisition and linguistics on standards committees (if we can
get anybody to listen to us).

As to the difficulty of the range of concepts to which <-'s> is applied,
I don't think it's all that difficult to teach. (Of coures, we don't
have to teach the meanings that the affix represents; native speakers
already know this, albeit unconsciously. What needs to be taught is the punctuation.)

Possession is a central or prototypical use of <-'s> that students can
readily  understand. It can then be extended to other cases. Also, in
other cases, students can try paraphrasing the expression with 'of':

'the club's members' = 'the members of the club'
'the poem's nuances' = 'the nuances of the poem'

The plural cases are a little harder, since -s does double duty in English:

'the clubs' members' = 'the members of the clubs'

These can be tackled after the singulars are firm, and students get used
to monitoring for the plural/genitive distinction.

On this same point, I have noticed that public media (newspapers,
magazines) have stopped using an apostrophe in expressions like
'teachers' union' and many, many other similar examples. I saw one
recently which could not be alternatively analyzed as plural noun
modifying the second noun. It's very likely that <-'s> is on its way out
of English usage, or that it's usage is becoming variable, usable for
either plural or possessive. Although this will lead to ambiguity in
some cases, it's possible that the change can't be stopped. Punctuation
habits do change over time, along with other aspects of language. And if
reading as a habit and hobby continue to decline, teaching the rule will
probably not be very effective. Also, if public media begin to present
examples that violate the current rule, even reading will not be a
corrective. I've seen quite a few books that contain regular violations
of current punctuation rules, e.g., the use of commas between a long
subject phrase and the verb.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Johanna Rubba   Assistant Professor, Linguistics
English Department, California Polytechnic State University
One Grand Avenue  • San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
Tel. (805)-756-2184  •  Fax: (805)-756-6374 • Dept. Phone.  756-259
• E-mail: [log in to unmask] •  Home page: http://www.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
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"Understanding is a lot like sex; it's got a practical purpose,
but that's not why people do it normally"  -            Frank  Oppenheimer
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