Friday, May 5, 2017

possessives - Why is "our today's meeting" wrong?



One of the answers to this question states that "We shall discuss it in our today's meeting" is grammatically correct. To me, that sentence is clearly wrong. While in today's meeting is fine and in our today meeting is OKish (though at the very least clumsy), there's something about the possessive there (our today's) that makes it wrong for me.



I would read that sentence as in our today's (as opposed to your today's) meeting. Similar to in our car's trunk where the our clearly modifies car and not trunk or car trunk, the our in our today's seems to be modifying today's and not meeting.



So, my questions are i) is it actually grammatically wrong to say in our today's or is it just a question of usage? and ii) if it is indeed wrong, how can we explain its wrongness?



Answer



Usually, a noun phrase in English must have exactly one determiner: you can say "I drove the car" or "I drove my car", but not "I drove car" or "I drove the my car".



Certain nouns (such as plural nouns and proper nouns) don't need determiners: "I love bees", "I love milk", "I love Paris", "I love biology". But I can't think of a case where it's ever legal to use two or more determiners for a single noun phrase. (A possible example would be "all my children", but I'm not sure "all" is acting as a determiner there.)



"Our today's meeting" is illegal because the noun phrase "meeting" has two determiners, "our" and "today's". It would also be illegal to say "the today's meeting" or "our the meeting".


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