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I often hear Americans use a phrase construction that sounds redundant to me. An example is:
"I'm a friend of Carol's" instead of (my preference) "I'm a friend of Carol."
Of course, we could say "I'm Carol's friend" but that could mistakenly imply I'm Carol's only friend; hence, I use the "of" construction.
I've heard British speakers construct our sample phrase as:
"I'm a friend of Carol" but I rarely hear that form issuing from the mouths of Americans (which would look silly if I wrote Americans').
"This is a book of yours" sounds fine to me; while "This is a book of you" sounds ridiculous.
In Spanish and French (and other Romance languages), we simply put the noun after the prepostion, as in -
"libro de Juan" and "livre de Marie" because those languages don't use apostrophe s to show possession. English, however, isn't a Romance language.
My fears are that
1) "I'm a friend of Carol's" has gradually slipping into everyday use and become acceptable in spoken American English, but not in formal written English or
2) I've been living too long in an area not known for its cutting edge grammar usage.
Your thoughts, please.
That's a tough one for many.
Almost all Romance languages (i.e., excluding Romanian) have no genitive case to speak of, so they use what's called a postmodifying genitive to show possession. As, el libro de Juan (John's book) or la mano de Pedro (Peter's hand).
The reason(ing) behind using the genitive case in English after already stating “of” is that we wouldn't say (for example) “a book of *him” but rather “a book of his.” So, grammar, is largely expected to be parallel in its constructions. Consider the awkwardness of the following sentence:
“James likes fishing, to hunt, and learned how to use a bow and arrow.”
Okay, that was a bit overboard, but I just wanted to emphasize the contrasting elements: fishing (gerund), to hunt (infinitive), and learned (preterite). So, it would make more sense and sound better if each of the tenses is kept the same: infinitive + infinitive + infinitive or gerund + gerund + gerund, etc.
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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