Saxon genitive
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googl
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Saxon genitive
I'd like to ask whether (from grammatical point of view) is Saxon genitive ('s) a (post)determiner or an adjective? I can put 'the' before it, so it is not a central determiner nor it is a predeterminer.
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Alan
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By a rather loose, traditional classification, any determiner - and even an article - can be called an 'adjective', but generally these days we would classify possessive nouns as determiners.
The 'the' that can precede a possessive-case noun (by virtue of that noun's retention of its normal syntactic powers even when functioning determinatively) should be regarded as part of the determiner itself, rather than as an element that can be added to it. Thus we would describe possessive noun phrase the postman's in the postman's cat as a PHRASAL DETERMINER, in contrast with simple determiner Peter's in Peter's cat.
The 'the' that can precede a possessive-case noun (by virtue of that noun's retention of its normal syntactic powers even when functioning determinatively) should be regarded as part of the determiner itself, rather than as an element that can be added to it. Thus we would describe possessive noun phrase the postman's in the postman's cat as a PHRASAL DETERMINER, in contrast with simple determiner Peter's in Peter's cat.