Re: Cases, again

"Mark J. Reed" wrote:
>
> On Fri, Mar 19, 2004 at 06:09:29PM +0000, Ray Brown wrote:
> > I've even heard - I kid you not - "You must come to Richard and I's
> > house sometime."
>
> Yes, well, the possessive of conjoined nouns has been known to confound
> many a locutor, rather understandably IMHO.  The correct version of the
> above is presumably "Richard's and my", but we're used to sticking the
> possessive at the very end of a noun and the speaker is thinking of
> "Richard and I/me" as a single noun unit.
Not to mention that "Come to Richard and my house" sounds (at least to
me) like "Come to Richard and come to my house".  To a lesser extent,
this is true with other nouns, "Richard and Jane" for example, has a
similar problem, is it "Richard and Jane's house" or "Richard's and
Jane's house"?  Either way sounds funny to me.  I sometimes just use an
of-phrase there.  I especially tend to use of-phrases with more complex
noun phrases, like "the house of a friend of mine" or even more likely,
"the house of a friend of mine from school", although even with a phrase
like that, -'s is not impossible, or even particularly rare, in my
idiolect.  It's just that "of" tends to be more frequent the more
complex a phrase is.

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