Post
by Pops Finn » Sun 08.09.2009 11:58 am
I was delighted to find this group (or whatever it's called; I'm a little behind on web terminology) having a discussion of the phrase "your guys's", as it's one of my favorites among the little oddities that I collect in English usage (and in the usage of the 6 other languages I speak, unfortunately all Indo-European. I know almost nothing about Japanese except some verses of “Ue o muite arukō”, which was a hit for Kyu Sakamoto in 1963, when I first heard it.)
I think I can account for the expression well enough to satisfy even the official linguist(s) here.
First, although "they don't teach it in school", English personal pronouns can function as adjectives, as in “you idiot!” – and as in “you guys”.
(1) The “your” is a matter of grammatical anticipation.
(i.e., of what we can call “grammatical anticipation”; I don’t know the official linguistic term.) Because the adjective in “you guys” is the pronoun “you”, many people in speaking the phrase feel a tendency to anticipate the possessive case of the phrase as a whole by making the pronoun itself possessive. That tendency has increased since I first heard “you guys’s” some 20 years ago, before which time I think most gringos would say “Is that you guys’ dog?” if they were among those who used “you guys” as the 2nd person plural. If I utter that earlier form to myself I can’t really say for sure that I remember hearing it before I started noticing “your guys’s”, but that’s likely because there’s nothing remarkable about it.
[I should explain that I use the term “gringo” to mean a USA-ian whose forebears immigrated here long enough ago (probably 150 years or more) that he or she doesn’t think of belonging to any immigrant group. All the xenophobes who complain about immigrants are gringos, for instance, but then so am I. I’ve come to use this term because there doesn’t seem otherwise to be one for this class of people, and because it angers me to hear someone use “American” or “real American” or “regular American” so as to exclude relative newcomers. For that matter, I object when my South American friends use “American” to mean USA-ian, telling them, “But you’re American yourself, and so are Canadians. If anyone knows a good term for what I’m calling a USA-ian, or a better term than my “gringo”, I’d love to hear it.]
(2) The “Guys’s” comes a consequence of using “your”.
Once I’ve said “your”, if I complete the phrase as “your guy’s”, then it sounds like it means “your guy’s”, so that
Is that your guys’ dog?
would be likely to be heard as meaning
Does that dog belong to your guy?
instead of
Does that dog belong to you guys?
English speaker know well that adding an s sound to the end of a word indicates the possessive form, so to keep from being misunderstood here, someone whose changed the “you” to “your” will likely follow through by adding that sound. And that’s why they say.
Is that your guys’s dog?
I love little oddities like this particularly when they’re “wrong” because, as I’m fond of telling my college math students,
There ain’t no official right or wrong in English.
Most of them don’t know this, having had “rules” of “correct grammar” drilled into them by teachers since they were 6 years old. By contrast, there is an official right and wrong in French, determined by L'Académie française, which last I heard was still asserting that “un hamburger” and “le weekend” were not French. But the French themselves couldn’t care less about the pronouncements of these stuffy pedants, and almost no one says “la fin de la semaine”. But there never has been any such “learned body” for English, and if there were one in England, American speakers would disdain it, and vice versa.
It’s all really just a mater of opinion. But some opinions are more considered than others. My favorite commentary of English Usage is Fowler’s Modern English Usage, which I often read through for hours. It’s not always easy to find what you’re looking for in Fowler, because of his idiosyncratic labeling of topics. His comments on the possessive singular, for instance, are under the heading “Possessive puzzles”. But Fowler is the best. My favorite shorter reference is Strunk and White (i.e., The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White).
Pops