"London's children and family portrait photographer" or "London's children's and family portrait photographer"? Any help gratefully appreciated
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herisson
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4Children is the plural of child. – Peter Shor Aug 04 '17 at 17:54
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1Duplicate of children's literature or children literature and others, eg Is it correct to say I write children books-not possessive case. – Edwin Ashworth Aug 04 '17 at 22:45
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It's acceptable to some to use the new-fangled "London's childrens and family portrait photographer". – Edwin Ashworth Aug 04 '17 at 22:49
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To me, "children" sounds unacceptable as an attributive noun. Both "*children portrait" and "*children photographer" sound incorrect, so I don't see any way that "children and family portrait photographer" could be correct.
I would say you have a choice between "(London's) children's and family portrait photographer" and "(London's) child and family portrait photographer" (or using some other construction entirely).
You can find multiple examples of both "children's and family portrait photographer" and "child and family portrait photographer" via Google search. I don't see any clear reason why either would be wrong, and neither one seems clearly preferable to me. "Child and family portrait photographer" seems to have more parallelism, but "children's portrait photography/-pher" seems to be a fairly common phrasing, with many examples on Google Books; likewise for "children's photographer".
herisson
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