The difficulty over the apostrophe starts when we move on to plural nouns. The problem arises from thinking that the apostrophe has something to do with making words plural. It does not. To repeat the point we made earlier: adding’s has nothing to do with making words plural.
We usually make nouns plural by adding s; so, for example, cat becomes cats; student becomes students. There are, though, some words which make their plurals differently: the plural of child is children; leaf becomes leaves; kiss becomes kisses; mouse becomes mice. Most nouns, however, form plurals simply by adding s to the singular.
Where students usually get in a muddle – if this applies to you, read slowly at this point – is with the apostrophe when there is a plural noun. There is, though, no need for confusion. The basic rule is that you adds to form a possessive. Thus:
The children’s party had to be cancelled.
This means that the party of the children had to be cancelled: the plural noun is children. With this example we can compare the following, all adding’s: George’s essay, France’s territory, somebody’s dog, men’s ties, women’s rights.
Three exceptions
There are just three places where this basic rule does not apply. First, if the plural noun already ends in’s’, we only add an apostrophe:
The teachers’ strike showed no sign of ending.
The pupils’ education was being disrupted.
It was several years’ work down the drain.
In each of these cases the word before the apostrophe is plural: teachers, pupils, years. If we take the first example, we can see that it is about the strike of more than one teacher – it is the strike of several teachers. A way of decoding this is to say that we know it is plural because we have added only an apostrophe: the s comes before the apostrophe, so the base word is teachers. If it were just one teacher, we would write the teacher’s strike: here the s comes after the apostrophe, so the base word is teacher and we have addend’s.
The second exception where we add only an apostrophe is with names ending in s where we don’t pronounce them with an extra s. Thus we have:
Thomas’s arrival
but
Ulysses’ journey
What, though, if we were talking about the arrival of the whole Thomas family rather than one individual called Thomas? In other words, what if we wanted to discuss the arrival of the Thomases? The plural of Thomas is Thomases, that is, the plural ends in es. Because it is plural, we treat it just like the word teachers, as a plural noun ending in s:
The Thomases’ arrival.
We have included this example because it reinforces how to apply the rule in the case of a plural noun ending in s- just add an apostrophe.
The final exception is where we add nothing. We began this section with the confusion in the nation’s greengrocers about how to spell the plural Word Potatoes. We do not add an apostrophe to words to make them plural, hut there is also another set of words where we do not add an apostrophe. These are possessive pronouns:
It is his car. Where are our coats? Whose is this dog? That is hers, but where is my hat? I think this is yours.
Most people know most of these: occasionally a student will write her’, and some students confuse who’s (an interrogative pronoun) with the contracted form who’s, meaning who is or who has. We deal with contractions below, but there is one more word to add to this list of exceptions which causes more confusion than almost any other word in the English language – the word its:
A dog wags its tail.
Here the word its acts as a possessive in the same way that the words my, hers and ours do above, There is another word it’s, but this is not a possessive; Instead, it’s means It is’. We discuss this further below, but at this point the key thing to remember is that the word its means ‘belonging to it’. There is no such word as it’s’. If you write its’, however accidental the slip, those reading your work will immediately notice it and wonder why you have not avoided one of the commonest errors in writing. The answer is to tell yourself we never write its’, that we never place an apostrophe at the end of the word its.
Tags: apostrophe, base word, education, plural noun, plural nouns, plurals, possessive pronoun, singular, wags
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