I was wondering why we do not use 's for some nouns that belong to other nouns?
For example:
book cover or book's cover
and
house's door or house door
Which one is right ?
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Varun Nair
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Hossein
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Possible duplicate of "Spain's prince" or "Spain's prince's" – Chenmunka Jan 27 '16 at 10:14
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1@Chenmunka the question is different from the one quoted! – Maulik V Jan 27 '16 at 10:23
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both are right, but prefer those without the apostrophe. That's how we practice. Because in other case, it looks odd. Consider - Manchester team football player over Manchester's team's football's player! :P – Maulik V Jan 27 '16 at 10:30
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1That's why its shortened to ManU's player... or were you thinking about City? – Peter Jan 27 '16 at 10:54
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1@Chenmunka Did you actually read both questions carefully? The "Spain's prince" is about the multiple possessive constructions, and this is about possessive vs. noun adjunct. – Nihilist_Frost Jan 27 '16 at 15:45
2 Answers
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They are both correct.
A book's cover is called a book cover
Book in book cover acts more like an adjective describing cover just as
front cover
back cover
cloud cover
buggy cover
these are saying what the cover is associated with. It is possible the usage of book's cover changed to book cover sometime in the past.
Though they both refer to the same thing: the dust jacket of a book
book's cover
emphasizes the book
book cover
emphasizes the cover
Peter
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Peter has done a pretty good job explaining how this works. As for the why, that's a trickier question.
In X's Y, X's is a possessive: the Y belongs to the X.
In X Y, X is a noun adjunct: X acts like an adjective describing the Y.
Here's a discussion of the difference on English.SE.
To give some examples of usage, I would say that house's door means "a door belonging to a house" while house door means "a door of the type house". A door is only a house's door if it actually belongs to or is associated with a particular house, but it could be a house door even if it's never belonged to any house - for example, maybe it is at the hardware store waiting for someone to buy it and put it on their house.
Sometimes you can use either one:
Approaching the scene of the explosion, he saw a car door lying in the middle of the street.
works just as well as
Approaching the scene of the explosion, he saw a car's door lying in the middle of the street.
It works both ways because it was a door of the type 'car' and it was a door that had belonged (presumably) to a specific car.
