Possessives

Or: How do you use that darned apostrophe, anyway?

Need a review of parts of speech? It might help with possessives.

What is a possessive, anyway? Well, you know that you own certain things: your bicycle, your books, your shoes. You can indicate that with a verb: I own my bike. But you can also indicate ownership with nouns and pronouns: It's my bike. The bike is mine.

Well, the bike "owns" things too: its wheels, its handlebars, its seat. You can say: The bike has a seat, handlebars, etc. But you can also refer to the bike's seat, the bike's handlebars, the bike's wheels. See? That's possessive, and we need to use an apostrophe.

The problem is that possessives and plurals in English both usually end in s. So you have to be careful of two things: do you have a noun or a verb? and do you have a singular or a plural noun? (Singular is ONE; plural is MORE THAN ONE.)

The apostrophe is in its form quite simple: '. How, you may well ask, can this simple little piece of punctuation strike fear into the hearts of men?

Why do people find possessives so difficult? Unlike most grammatical rules in English, the rules for possessives are easy, and what's more, they actually work! How many rules in English can you say that for?

The reason people find possessives so difficult is that English relies on one letter way too much: s. That's right; if we used the w or the b for more grammatical markers, we wouldn't have these problems. But there you go; English is a historical language, and our ancestors were too busy trying to survive or speaking French at court to worry about how the 's would work 500 years later with computers.

So here goes:

A good rule of thumb is that if a noun is followed by a noun, the first one probably takes the possessive.
     Right: dog's collar, cat's fur (if there's one dog and one cat)
     Right: dogs' collars, cats' fur (if there's more than dog and more than one cat)
     Wrong: dogs collar, cats fur
(Dog, bowl, cat, and fur are all nouns.)

If, however, a noun is followed by a verb, the noun is probably in the plural.
     Right: dogs chase cars, cats torment mice
     Wrong: dog's chase cars, cat's torment mice
(Dogs and cats are nouns; chase and torment are verbs.)

Verbs NEVER take apostrophes. And in general plurals don't either. The only plurals that take an apostrophe are things that don't have a plural normally, like letters of the alphabet or numbers. The letter "a" doesn't have a plural, and we do have a word "as," so if we wanted to say "There are eleven a's in that sentence," we would have to use an apostrophe. But that's not the norm.

You can test to see if you have a possessive construction by seeing if you can make an "of" expression of it. A possessive will always make an "of" expression.
For example:
     That woman's sweater is pink. (The sweater of that woman is pink.)
     Your dog's bark is loud. (The bark of your dog is loud.)
     My bank's hours are not very convenient. (The hours of my bank are not very convenient.)
     The students' voices were not heard in their debate with the administration. (The voices of the students were not heard in their debate with the administration.)

If you can't make an "of" expression, you don't have a possessive.
For example:
     The sopranos sing high C in that aria. (You can't say "The sing of the sopranos high C in that aria.")
Sopranos is a plural, not a possessive.

     Several kids got their licenses suspended for running stop signs. (You can't say "The got of several kids their licenses suspended for running stop signs.")
Kids is a plural, not a possessive.

So here are the rules for the singular possessive:
There is only one: add 's.

(one) dog's bowl
(one) princess's tiara
(one) boss's bad mood
(one) woman's hat
(one) child's toy
(one) sheep's wool
(one) baby's rattle

For the plural possessive there are two, maybe three, rules:
1) Turn the singular form of the noun into the plural.
Note: This is critically important, and will save you almost all the errors you are ever likely to make with the possessive.
2) Add '.
In most cases, you are finished, because in most cases this ends up meaning that you added s' to the noun.
But because English is a historical language, and has numerous irregular plurals, we sometimes have
3) Add s if the word does not end in s.

Examples:
(more than one) dogs' bowl(s)
(more than one) princesses' tiara(s)
(more than one) bosses' bad moods
(more than one) women's hats
(more than one) children's toys
(more than one) sheep's wool
(more than one) babies' rattles

Whoa! Slow down! How did we do that? Let's review:
Rule 1) Turn the singular into the plural. Princess goes to princesses; boss goes to bosses; woman goes to women; child goes to children; baby goes to babies. Sheep (like elk, moose, fish, and deer) is the same in the plural as it is in the singular.

Rule 2) Add apostrophe. We end up with princesses', babies', and bosses'. These are correct.

Rule 3) OK, for those plurals that didn't end in s--women, children, sheep--we have to add an s, because our ear wants to hear that s sound to know we have a possessive. They now become: women's, children's, and sheep's. These are now correct.

WARNING: The personal pronouns in English (he, she, it, I, you, we, they, who) NEVER take an apostrophe in their possessive form. The personal pronouns are hers, his, its, mine, yours, ours, theirs, whose.

Note: "it's" and "who's" are ALWAYS contractions for "it is" and "who is." (You can't say "her is" or "your is.") Its' does not exist in English.

A brief note on contractions:
If a letter is removed from a word, we can replace that letter with an apostrophe.
For example: will not becomes won't, can not becomes can't, and does not becomes doesn't.

And you, my friend, are now an expert in the apostrophe!