By Apostrophes, Inflections

This is sometimes called the greengrocer's apostrophe, i.e. a redundant apostrophe before a plural inflection on notices promoting foodstuffs. (Potatoe's is also quite common.)Probably the establishment had found themselves with a surplus, after omitting apostrophes elsewhere (e.g. on the...

The "-s" is the most common suffix left in English by now, it took over several functions: a) plural indicator: one apple - two apples b) 3rd ps sg inflection indicator: sing - he sings c) genitive ending: Jon's house It would be erroneous to say that the suffixes in a), b) and c) are the...

Hi Yoshi, He got all A's. The word A's functions as a plural noun. If we add the noun "grades", the result is ungrammatical: *He got all A's grades. (ungrammatical) There are two problems with the above sentence: 1) if A's is a noun, then there should be a conjunction joining it and the...