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It must not be used for plurals or most of the possessive forms. The only exceptions are the possessive cases of names ending in an "s"-sound as in Max' Vater, or "to prevent ambiguities" in all other possessive cases of names, as in Andrea's Blumenladen (referring to the female name Andrea, not the male name Andreas). The English/Saxon style ...
The possessive form of an English noun, or more generally a noun phrase, is made by suffixing a morpheme which is represented orthographically as ' s (the letter s preceded by an apostrophe), and is pronounced in the same way as the regular English plural ending (e)s: namely, as / ɪ z / when following a sibilant sound (/ s /, / z /, / ʃ /, / ʒ /, / tʃ / or / dʒ /), as / s / when following ...
The Chicago Manual of Style (15th edition): "The possessive of most singular nouns is formed by adding an s, and the possessive of plural nouns (except for a few irregular plurals that do not end in s) by adding an apostrophe only...The general rule covers most proper nouns, including names ending in s, x, or z, in both their singular and ...
Timothy Pulju, a senior lecturer in linguistics at Dartmouth College, said that until the 17th or 18th century, the possessive of proper names ending in S — such as Jesus or Moses — often was ...
Vocative case. In grammar, the vocative case (abbreviated VOC) is a grammatical case which is used for a noun that identifies a person (animal, object, etc.) being addressed or occasionally for the noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and numerals) of that noun. A vocative expression is an expression of direct address by which ...
Most nouns in English have distinct singular and plural forms. Nouns and most noun phrases can form a possessive construction. Plurality is most commonly shown by the ending-s (or -es), whereas possession is always shown by the enclitic-'s or, for plural forms ending in s, by just an apostrophe. Consider, for example, the forms of the noun girl.
Colloquially the possessive of the nominative Jesus is spoken as three syllables, best represented as Jesus's. I have never heard the allegedly 'correct' possessive pronounced as two syllables. That tradition may have died; it's just taking a while for the written possessive to catch up. 86.132.113.250 15:41, 12 January 2006 (UTC) [ reply]
Meaning. Although the everyday meaning of plural is "more than one", the grammatical term has a slightly different technical meaning. In the English system of grammatical number, singular means "one (or minus one)", and plural means "not singular". In other words, plural means not just "more than one" but also "less than one (except minus one)".