1

I am interested in which nominal phrases of the general form

Article + Noun + of + Accusative pronoun + of + Genitive pronoun

sound more or less grammatical to most speakers. Primarily, what interests me about them (for those who accept them as fully idiomatic) is the restrictions over the admissible instances of Article and Noun. For instance, it seems that demonstrative determiners are OK (Kayne 1981 gives (1a) as an example) but definite articles aren't (1b). Also, besides event nominalizations like harassment, some nouns like picture (2a) appear to me to be more amenable to the construction than other nouns like story (2b).

(1a) this harassment of her of yours       ✓
(1b) the harassment of her of yours        ✗
(2a) two nude pictures of you of mine      ✓
(2b) two prison stories of you of mine     ✗

Is this correct? Does anyone have any clue as to what may be going on here? My observations are super exploratory, so I'd really appreciate some external input/more examples to mull over.

Zoltan
  • 473
  • 1
    Please provide an example in context that wasn't made up specifically for the purpose. – DW256 Apr 12 '21 at 06:05
  • 2
    I'd hesitate to say "this harassment of her of yours" sounds "OK" to me. The only reason I can think of to differentiate between its acceptability and the acceptability of "the harassment of her of yours" is because the second has the obvious more natural rephrasing "your harassment of her". – herisson Apr 12 '21 at 06:06
  • 4
    Why torture the language? – Xanne Apr 12 '21 at 06:28
  • 1
    @Xanne Theoretical linguists need to design crucial experiments in order to test interesting, far-reaching hypothesis about the recursive rules of language. You just cannot build a science off of ecological observations. That is why physicists build LHCs and linguists "torture" the language. – Zoltan Apr 12 '21 at 06:38
  • @Xanne I agree. This is a case where the rules are likely to be more complicated than the examples. Rules should encapsulate pervasive generalities, not generate arbitrary obscurity. – Anton Apr 12 '21 at 07:26
  • 3
    No living native speaker that I know of, speaks like this. Interesting the alignment of harassment, photos of nudity and prisonment! – Mari-Lou A Apr 12 '21 at 07:32
  • 2
    It's always intriguing what areas of life people choose when inventing examples. – Michael Harvey Apr 12 '21 at 07:48
  • There's grammatical. And there's unacceptable-on-sounding-outlandish-grounds. The overlap is not exact. Even with acceptability, the situation is not black and white, as proved by research by Greenbaum and Svartvik. // FWIW, I'd say all your examples are perfectly grammatical, and sound perfectly awful. As @Mari-Lou says, not standard usages (though it's quite conceivable they could be stumbled into in conversations). 'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously' was contrived solely to make a point. Native speakers avoid, disregard / or rephrase to sound natural where necessary. – Edwin Ashworth Apr 12 '21 at 13:24
  • I am very hard pressed to imagine that this wouldn't be: your harassment of her. Why choke on your examples? Sense is something they do not make. – Lambie Apr 12 '21 at 14:36
  • 1
    With “the/an X of yours”, this usually denotes one X from the set of your Xes. When there is only one X, this is an odd construction to use because we could simply say “your X”. So we’d expect, therefore, some kind of extra effect for having to do the extra processing. And that’s indeed what we find. The “that X of yours” when there is only one X conveys some attitudinal information on the part of the speaker. The “this/that” part intensifies this attitude and marks the X as being of heightened interest/relevance. – Araucaria - Him Apr 12 '21 at 16:15
  • 1
    One thing implicit in @Araucaria's comment is that the unacceptability of 1b is nothing to do with the "of her". A simpler example of the same thing: "This story of yours" is OK, but "the story of yours" is no more acceptable than 1b, because, if that's what you meant, you'd say "your story". "NP of yours" means "your NP". You'd say "NP of yours" only if you couldn't put "your" in the determiner-slot because some other determiner was already there. (If that determiner were "the", then it's OK for "your" to replace it, because "your", like "the", is definite.) – Rosie F Apr 12 '21 at 19:27
  • @BenjaminHarman I think the difference between "harassment" and "harassment case" is that only the former denotes a relation, and only relational nominals select accusative pronouns (cf. "these pictures of him" vs. "these t-shirts of his"). Perhaps the contrast is clearer with "criticism": "these criticisms of me of yours". Though double genitives of course also exist, as you point out. By the way, it's interesting that you added a definite article to example (2a). I thought these double genitives were compatible with indefinite articles and demonstratives, but not with definite articles. – Zoltan May 13 '21 at 06:58
  • Whoops; that should have been 'There's ungrammatical. And there's unacceptable-on-sounding-outlandish-grounds. The overlap is not exact.' But I wanted both 'grammatical' and 'unacceptable-on-sounding-outlandish-grounds', so perhaps I need 'the disjunction is non-empty'. This sounds as bad as the examples. – Edwin Ashworth Sep 09 '21 at 18:19
  • Also, repeats can sound ludicrous. 'A painting of you of hers of mine' [subject / painter / owner]. – Edwin Ashworth Sep 09 '21 at 18:24
  • @EdwinAshworth Ludicrous but in principle intelligible? For example, is there a fact of the matter as to who might possibly be the subject of 'A painting of you of hers of mine' and who the painter and/or owner? If there is (e.g., if the first genitive can never express the owner), then these clunky nominals are entirely expected products of the rules of language. – Zoltan Sep 13 '21 at 08:48
  • The rules of language are hierarchical, with Orwell's Sixth topping the pile. Avoid saying anything most would consider ludicrous, even if you have to break other rules to achieve this yet communicate clearly. Stacked modifiers are explicitly discouraged in style guides. Even if say Monk & Weiss had posited a rule based on imagined similarities with Latin, so few people would have heard of it that it would have to be considered unusable on usage grounds. People rephrase if they have to multi-qualify: ' A portrait of you painted by Troy that I now own'. – Edwin Ashworth Sep 13 '21 at 16:52

1 Answers1

1

I'll simply cite the King of Spain's daughter's doll's dress as evidence that "possession" (whether conveyed using the Saxon genitive 's or the preposition of) can be used recursively to any required depth.

It's similar to the potentially infinite "syntactic recursion" taught to many native Anglophones as children...

This is the horse and the hound and the horn
That belonged to the farmer sowing his corn
That kept the rooster that crowed in the morn
That woke the judge all shaven and shorn
That married the man all tattered and torn
That kissed the maiden all forlorn
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn
That tossed the dog that worried the cat
That killed the rat that ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.

(Or I thought [that] you knew he said she believed they expected us to use a deeply-nested construction.)

Obviously the rules of the relevant syntax allow us to produce constructions that are ridiculously ugly and/or difficult to understand. But it's always a stylistic choice how far to take things, not a matter of "grammatical rules" as such.

FumbleFingers
  • 140,184
  • 45
  • 294
  • 517
  • 2
    But patterning is never proof that a different (if related) construction is licensed. I'll see you in the time of two days. Doom's Crack. – Edwin Ashworth Apr 12 '21 at 13:17
  • Should my first example perhaps have been *Spain's king's daughter's doll's dress* then, to make sure I was only illustrating the Saxon genitive? Alternatively, *The dress of the doll of the daughter of the king of Spain*, to match OP's version? – FumbleFingers Apr 12 '21 at 13:48
  • 1
    'Two paintings of note of castles of Wales of Turner's of yours.' – Edwin Ashworth Apr 12 '21 at 15:20
  • Actually, that's not infinite recursion; it's tail recursion because it comes to a halt. Each successive relative clause (..._ that V the NP) modifies the NP object of the transitive V before it, until the last verse, which has an intransitive V, thus no object NP, nothing to modify, no relative clause, end of the sentence (which started with _This is..), drop your voice. Oh, and the second her in the OQ is not genitive; it's objective. – John Lawler Apr 12 '21 at 15:51