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NPs containing double genitives: "this harassment of her of yours"

English Language & Usage Asked on April 14, 2021

I am interested in which nominal phrases of the general form

Article + Noun + of + Accusative pronoun + of + Genitive pronoun

sound more or less grammatical to most speakers. Primarily, what interests me about them (for those who accept them as fully idiomatic) is the restrictions over the admissible instances of Article and Noun. For instance, it seems that demonstrative determiners are OK (Kayne 1981 gives (1a) as an example) but definite articles aren’t (1b). Also, besides event nominalizations like harassment, some nouns like picture (2a) appear to me to be more amenable to the construction than other nouns like story (2b).

(1a) this harassment of her of yours       ✓
(1b) the harassment of her of yours        ✗
(2a) two nude pictures of you of mine      ✓
(2b) two prison stories of you of mine     ✗ 

Is this correct? Does anyone have any clue as to what may be going on here? My observations are super exploratory, so I’d really appreciate some external input/more examples to mull over.

One Answer

I'll simply cite the King of Spain's daughter's doll's dress as evidence that "possession" (whether conveyed using the Saxon genitive 's or the preposition of) can be used recursively to any required depth.

It's similar to the potentially infinite "syntactic recursion" taught to many native Anglophones as children...

This is the horse and the hound and the horn
That belonged to the farmer sowing his corn
That kept the rooster that crowed in the morn
That woke the judge all shaven and shorn
That married the man all tattered and torn
That kissed the maiden all forlorn
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn
That tossed the dog that worried the cat
That killed the rat that ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.

(Or I thought [that] you knew he said she believed they expected us to use a deeply-nested construction.)


Obviously the rules of the relevant syntax allow us to produce constructions that are ridiculously ugly and/or difficult to understand. But it's always a stylistic choice how far to take things, not a matter of "grammatical rules" as such.

Answered by FumbleFingers on April 14, 2021

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