With a title like “Apostrophe’s War”, you’ll be forgiven in thinking that this is yet another trite rant on the supposed abuse of the apostrophe in contemporary written English. However, those who know me as a linguist may think I am writing to counter this barbarian prescriptivism with scientific purity.
No and no!
Many will be familiar with the notion of “Grammar Nazis”: a cohort of lunatics and those whom have too much time on their hands who believe that proper English usage is that which has been passed on to them through hallowed, Victorian texts. Immutable laws that afford derision towards anyone who doesn’t adhere!
Of course, these laws are largely bullshit. They were derived from, what was considered at the time, the pure languages of the classical world: Latin and Ancient Greek. Things like, “don’t split infinitives” and “you can’t end a sentence with a preposition”. These processes, if they can be done at all, lead to ungrammaticality in these languages; but English is not Latin or Ancient Greek. Of course, it borrows a lot and shares its ancestry with their Indo-European roots, but the point about language is that it is not immutable. There is a notion of grammaticality — you can’t just randomly string words together — but it is much more subtle and innate than these prescriptive rules abide. Language is a fluid, living entity.
So what about the humble apostrophe?
Well, in written English, the apostrophe is used in several circumstances: it indicates possession (i.e., a genitive case marker, of sorts) and also contraction (morphosyntactic elision). The confusion comes when both of these effects are applied simultaneously, or with plurals, which share a morpheme. For example, this infamously occurs with pronouns: “its” is the possessive form of “it”, whereas “it’s” is short for “it is”; given that that genitive usage is perhaps more marked, this is a mistake familiar to any English teacher, proofreader and editor alike!
This misuse is what upsets people. There’s even an “Apostrophe Protection Society” for the truly militant! A recent article on Language Log, however, highlights how misinformed this attitude is. The author makes the point very well by countering the argument with numerous and esteemed counterexamples and, importantly, without turning it into an argument between prescriptivists and descriptivists. Allow me to build on this:
From a morphological and phonological point-of-view, it is clear that the genitive morpheme is identical to the plural morpheme and the contracted copula. That is, for example, you can’t disambiguate between “dogs” [dɒgz] and “dog’s” [dɒgz], nor “its” [ɪts] and “it’s” [ɪts]. Syntactically, however, we can easily make a distinction based on the local context: our aforementioned innate ability to parse a sentence’s grammatical structure.
You’ll have noticed that I emphasised “written English” above: this wasn’t an accident! We thus see the point that the apostrophe is nothing more than an orthographic convention — merely part of the writing system — used to disambiguate between the various, overloaded forms. Just as commas are used to hint at prosodic phrase boundaries, its purpose is to make assimilating linguistic information in written form (i.e., reading) easier through consistency.
So now, back to the argument against apostrophe misuse. Personally, I would have to agree: not from a linguistic point-of-view, but from the belief that orthographic conventions, even those as bizarre as English’s, aren’t an inherently bad thing. By using a common style — spelling and punctuation — we can help to ensure comprehensibility and understanding in writing.
Of course, it’s not unto me (nor anyone) to say what is orthographically right and wrong. It, like any aspect of linguistics, must be allowed to evolve organically: in Shakespeare’s time, as the Language Log article demonstrates, apostrophes were not used; nowadays, they are expected, but seemingly in decline. The momentum of the corpus is of course a factor — writing systems obviously change more slowly than natural, spoken language — but change is indeed inevitable.