If you read my blog regularly, you will have noticed that my grammar leaves much to be desired. Though I went to High School in America, I wasn’t really taught grammar at school and I’m not good enough at languages to have figured it out on my own. Needless to say, I often make mistakes both in written and spoken speech (perhaps more in the latter), but, from time to time at least, I find grammar very interesting and want to know what’s the proper way to say something.
As I was writing a restaurant review for my Food Blog, I found myself in the situation of having to say “McDonald’s chicken nuggets”. Now “McDonald’s” is already in the possessive form, with an apostrophe-s following the proper noun. The name of the restaurant is not McDonald but McDonald’s. So I wondered how to make an already possessive word possessive again. Mike wasn’t sure, so I called my friend D. – a former teacher who knows English grammar backwards and forwards. Her answer was that you use only one apostrophe as the noun is actually expressing the possession of the noun that follows it (of course, she said so grammatically). That is to say, when you say “McDonald’s”, the “hamburgers” or, in this case, “chicken nuggets” is already implied. It’s logical, but it hadn’t occurred to me. I will continue with my constant grammar mistakes, but not with this particular one 🙂
As I was writing this posting another grammar question came to my mind. A proper sentence in English, I’ve always been told, has to have an explicit subject and a verb. There are no tacit subjects and no tacit predicates. The lack of tacit subjects is understandable, as English verbs are minimally conjugated. But there is no reason I can think of to explain why you cannot substitute a verb with a comma. For example, in Spanish I can say “The day, beautiful” with the “is” implied. In English, as far as I know, you can’t say that. Mike tells me that you can imply the verb in a sentence such as “Mike is going to the house and Mary to the park”, but I’m not sure if that is, indeed, grammatical.
And how about sentences with what I would call a propositional predicate? Can’t “To the house.” be a grammatical sentence?, one that would logically followed the sentence “Where are you going”?
I’ve also always been told that you cannot have a predicate-less sentence in English. For example, “A beautiful day.” is a proper sentence in Spanish. It’s called an “unimembre” sentence. While such sentences are not common in business or journalistic Spanish, they are often used in colloquial or literary language.
What I wonder is whether there is a “hidden” English grammar; one in which these type of constructions are grammatical, but which is not taught to not confuse students. After all, it’s difficult enough to get children to speak and write even simplified proper English.
I hope some day I meet a linguist or grammarian specializing in English, whom I can ask these questions 🙂
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Hi Margarita,
I often make recipes from your site, and i just now have looked at your blog. I am a linguist, and although i do not specialize in syntax (what you call grammar), I can assure you that you are right, there is a “hidden” grammar that all native speakers of a language know and learn when they are growing up. But they figure these things out by themselves, and no one ever has to tell them. What children learn at school is not really English grammar at all but rather how to write formally in whatever culture it is–you correctly point out some differences between Spanish and English literary usages.
Your point about “McDonald’s” is actually quite complex. You are absolutely correct in that normally you should add another apostrophe s but in English, unfortunately this makes for a very strange sound. (try pronouncing “Williams’s”). So we do not pronounce the second apostrophe s, and usually it is not written in either. It’s up to you.
Hope this helped somewhat,
Daniel