The contractive possessive apostrophe: Part 3

As I have mentioned, words work with other words in contexts. I.A. Richards called this “interanimation”:

“Words are the meeting points at which regions of experience which can never combine in sensation or intuition come together.” *

While it is possible to make any word into the owner and possessor of another thing with a possessive apostrophe, not all possessive cases are appropriate in all contexts. Idiomatically (meaning, when they feel like it and as long as everyone does it too), certain contexts omit the possessive—for example, pyjama legs or Womens (in the case of bathrooms or clothing sections in big department stores)—and these cases are still considered acceptable, even though they are not really correct. I personally feel this kind of thing contributes to the sensation of confusion that often pervades most people’s experience of grammar, but I am not in charge and must defer to language morphology (or else impale myself on my own exasperation with the written world around me, which seems excessively serious behaviour to engage in over punctuation).

To my mind, the key to happily using possessives in academic writing hinges on considering multiple contexts. These are (a) the required formality of academic style, in tension with (b) the author’s general style of expression, and in consideration of (c) any unnecessary complexity appearing in the sentence if it is altered to remove the possessive case.

Sound serious? It’s not; it’s just work. If it was fun, it would be called fun (stamping your foot can improve your odds of enjoyment, though). If you aren’t a student writing a thesis, I suggest you either get out now or read on for some information you almost certainly don’t have but may not need.

Students, read on: you need it.

Academic style is its own animal

Indeed, it could be said that academic style is a Cheshire Cat: purportedly all knowing, all-wise, only partly visible, and often exasperating. I can only offer you my view, and you may wish to disagree with me, so get ready to stamp your foot, as needed (Alice certainly would if she thought it justifiable, or just needed a bit of entertainment).

In a written academic context, the possessive case is (of course) both used and required, but some kinds of possessive cases can be too informal, while others are effectively just gauche. Here are some examples (that I made up from my experience of the business) of the kinds of possessives that occur in academic work, with my remarks:

The community’s view on the subject…

This is acceptable, because the community is made up of people and thus the owners of the view are animate objects. I would let this one stand.

The building’s features dominate the space…

This is becoming informal; the building is an inanimate object and has trouble bearing the load of ownership (even though it clearly has features). It might depend on the author’s style, but in general it would be better to use The features of the building […].

All of the experts remarked that the questions’ framework was poorly connected to the...

Beyond being too informal, this smacks of unconscious shorthand. I would only let this stand if the rest of the statement became unnecessarily convoluted or confusing if this phrase was changed (as it really should be) to read, All of the experts remarked that the framework of the questions was not well connected to the […].

Gallagher et al.’s study found that…

While (to my horror) some reputable sources consider this a correct use of the possessive apostrophe, I consider it gauche and will not tolerate it (the foot is determinedly down, here, as you see—great fun!). This is because et al. is a Latin abbreviation (it means “and others”) and as such cannot be turned into an English word and thus made possessive (it’s not even a word, folks, and it’s not English!). The study by Gallagher et al. is not so difficult to come by that we must succumb to what I consider (somewhat grumpily) an ethnocentric malapropism.

So, there you have it: Possessive apostrophes totally sorted. Here’s the summary:

First, find the owner. Next, if the owner is singular (there’s only one cat), give the word an apostrophe and an s; if the owner is singular and ends in s already (like a gallimimus), treat it as a plural and add only an apostrophe; or if the owner is plural (cats, questions, unavoidable mishaps), keep them together and only give them an apostrophe. (And good luck thinking of a possessive case for that last one, because I can’t.)

Have a beautiful day (and do randomly stamp your foot at people—it’s super fun!).

* Quoted on p. 456 of Booth, T. Y. (1986). I. A. Richards and the composing process. College Composition and Expression, 37(4), 453–465. https://doi.org/10.2307/357915.