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Preliminary Recommendations

 

Application to English

English nouns do not have gender as a morphosyntactic category. Also, case is a dubious category, since the only basis for a case distinction in modern English lies in the ` 's' or `s' ' ending attached to nouns and to some pronouns. It is arguable, however, that in modern English, this is not a case form, but an enclitic postposition. (This would explain the occurrence of phrases such as ``in a month or two's time'' or ``in someone else's garden'', where the ` 's' is clearly suffixed not to the head noun, but to the whole phrase.) Hence, in the present tagset, case is not applied to nouns, and the ` 's' is treated as a postposition.