[wagand]

Hi
One of my EFL students asked me:
Why is it OK to say the dog of my friend, and my friend's dog...
BUT NOT: Job's book and the table's leg?

Thank you all for your help

[rosends]

There are 2 separate problems here:
1. You CAN say "the table's leg" but the difficulty is that the table is an inanimate object which cannot "own" anything so the possessive nature of "of" is stretched. But the leg is "of" the table -- it DOES belong to it in some sense however...

2. The "of" in The Book of Job does not indicate possession. It indicates "about". And you can't reorder "the story about the frog" into a simple possessive "the frog's story" unless you change the meaning to mean not "the account of job from an outside story" to "the story concerning the frog" like "A Boy's Life"

So in both situatipons, the construction CAN exist, but you must be clear on meaning.

[pacmor00]

I'm an English teacher in Spain. And I wonder if there are two concepts called: EXPLICIT GRAMMAR AND IMPLICIT GRAMMAR in the process of teaching english as a second language?

[Krystal]

I'm ? And ? This is from a teacher of English? Stay in Spain.

[ilyosxon]

Because human is animate, object is inanimate