By Genitives, Expressions

Dear all, this is my first post. I learned a lot reading this forum and, now, I dare to ask my own question :-) ! Since I am a physicist, I often read in scientific papers either Einstein's equations or Einstein equations. Although I realize that such kind of expressions appears in a rather...

Grammar Geek wrote:What is the context for It's 10 minutes' meeting or It's a 10 minutes' meeting? Those don't sound normal at all! So I'm missing something. It's a meeting of 10 minutes sounds grammatical, but not natural. But my mind doesn't rebel against it like the two above. Hi GGI was...

CalifJim wrote:CB, I hate to disagree, because your comments are always so very helpful and appropriate, and you are such a valuable resource on the forum. Nevertheless, I don't think any poetic license whatever is involved here. Thank you for your kind words, Jim. As English is not my...

Hi KiitixayThe preposition is in or at in the basic expressions only:He came in the morning / in the afternoon / in the evening.You can see the stars at night.Nothing exceptional happened at noon.A plural is possible as well: It often rains in the mornings.When you deviate from the basic...

would you say "John calling" is a noun phrase almost identical to "his calling" where "calling" is a genitive functioning as a noun?No. There is nothing genitive going on here. It's (among other things) a Whiz-Deletion. That will be John who is calling. So calling is part of the verb...

Hi, Yankee and thank you for your ! Well, the fact is that before asking something here, I check it on the web. I found so many pages with that expression, I gave it for granted.... "Team USA needs a God's Gift to defeat Ghana" was one of the many examples I found on the web (... nothing...

Hi RosalamaNo answer to your question will please everybody. Many people think no apostrophe should be used in your expressions:in the 1980sThe plural genitive is formed by adding an apostrophe after the plural s, so the genitive should be:I don't like the 1980s' music.However, many people...

Believer wrote:Thank you, Marius and Milky. Tell me if my understanding is wrong. When you have some phrase in genitive??, then almost always the article the is for the noun in genitive and not the noun that comes/follows after the noun in genitive. the president's cup (here the is for...

J Lewis: Thank you for the explanation of 'soccer'. I knew it had been coined from 'association', but didn't know it had been done by the British.Words like 'clothesline' are in dictionaries, so it's understandable that the plural s is there. A United Nations assembly is not in dictionaries and...

However, in quantitative expressions of the following type there is possible variation: a ten day absence With temporal nouns in the plural, the apostrophe is sometimes omitted: several weeks'/weeks vacation Pages 325 &1333, A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, by Randolph...