...of Martha Stewart's

Question

From an article by Dominick Dunne in the current Vanity Fair:

"I've always been a fan of Martha Stewart's, full of admiration for the extraordinary success she made of her life."
I think it's OK, but there is something about it that makes me unsure.

It has to do with the word "fan" combined with that possessive apostrophe, combined with her full name.
I have no trouble at all with "I'm a friend of Martha's" though I'm not sure why it is possessive apparently on the part of Martha. It just sounds right.
But "I'm a friend of Martha Stewart's" begins to sound like there is more than one Martha Stewart and I like them all.
But "fan" rather than friend throws a wrench into the works somehow. "I'm a fan of Martha Stewart" sounds better (to me) than "I'm a fan of Martha Stewart's" but is it more approriate, or correct or what-have-you, or is Dunne in the clear?

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M. Cope quotes Dominick Dunne:
[nq:2]I've always been a fan of Martha Stewart's, full of admiration for the extraordinary success she made of her life.[/nq]
And comments:
[nq:1]I have no trouble at all with "I'm a friend of Martha's" though I'm not sure why it is possessive apparently on the part of Martha. It just sounds right.[/nq]
Yes, it's an idiom.
[nq:1]But "I'm a friend of Martha Stewart's" begins to sound like there is more than one Martha Stewart and I like them all.[/nq]
Not at all; it's the same idiom. And if it was a plural, not only would the idiom not apply, but the spelling would have to be "Martha Stewarts'".
[nq:1]But "fan" rather than friend throws a wrench into the works somehow.[/nq]
No it doesn't. Same idiom, no problem. I'm a fan of Isaac Asimov, a fan of Isaac Asimov's, an Isaac Asimov fan. Three ways to say the same thing.

Mark Brader "A hundred billion is not infinite Toronto and it's getting less infinite all the time!" (Email Removed) Isaac Asimov, "The Last Question"

My text in this article is in the public domain.

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[nq:1]M. Cope quotes Dominick Dunne: And comments:[/nq]
Don't like Martha, huh?

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[nq:1]From an article by Dominick Dunne in the current Vanity Fair: "I've always been a fan of Martha Stewart's, full ... fan of Martha Stewart's" but is it more approriate, or correct or what-have-you, or is Dunne in the clear?[/nq]
A case of that well-known English phenomenon where perfectly ordinary expressions start looking weird if you stare at them: Dunne is innocent.
But I think this double genitive construction really *is* weird: "She's a friend of John's"; "I'm a fan of Mozart's".

But on the other hand: "She's a friend of ours"; "I'm a fan of Mozart"; "She's a supporter of the Great Ormond Street Hospital". Go into the plural as you suggest, and we have "I'm a supporter of hospitals", or indeed "...of Martha Stewarts", also without the option.
I think an earlier generation would have stigmatized the -'s form, or at any rate tried to. If ever an AUE query was John Lawler territory, territory of John Lawler, or territory of John Lawler's, this is it.

Mike.

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[nq:2]From an article by Dominick Dunne in the current Vanity ... or correct or what-have-you, or is Dunne in the clear?[/nq]
[nq:1]A case of that well-known English phenomenon where perfectly ordinary expressions start looking weird if you stare at them: Dunne ... ever an AUE query was John Lawler territory, territory of John Lawler, or territory of John Lawler's, this is it.[/nq]
If you insist.
This construction is a bit odd, true enough. It uses both types of English possessive, the Germanic morphological -'s' and the Romance syntactic 'of'. Normally one is enough, though if you want strange, try using either ad lib in constructions where the other is normal:

?He sat at the table's foot.
?Sarah painted the house of Bill.
?International Pancakes' House
?Has he stopped beating the wife of him?
We have rules (which I'll return to below) about which type to use in which kinds of construction.
However, in this case the use of both has a purpose; it's the kind of thing syntax is good for coming up with an ad hoc way to specify something that's outside the usual purview of grammar.

In a normal noun phrase, there's one noun that's the head, and usually some determiner that modifies it. (There is a different sense of "head" in some MITish grammar theories, and in those it's the determiner that's the head of a noun phrase; but we'll ignore that for now.) Determiners include articles (the, a), demonstratives (this, those), quantifiers (some, many, no, five), and possessives (my, Bill's).
Though there is a lot of irregularity and idiomatization, normally you can only have one determiner at a time:
*the some people
*a their house
*a Martha's friend
That last one would mean, if it were grammatical, that we're talking about *a* person (of potentially many more) who is Martha's friend. I.e, Martha has an unknown number of friends and this person would be one of them, all in one noun phrase.
But we can't do that this way. So if we put each noun into its own noun phrase with the prepositional "of" possessive, we get "of Martha", which violates one of the rules I mentioned above for choosing which kind of possessive to use 's for people vs "of" for things. So "a friend of Martha" sounds strange, though not totally out. One way to make it sound better is to add the -'s possessive to "Martha", thereby making it familiar (if redundant but then redundancy is a design feature of language, not a bug, and certainly not anything to worry about).

So we wind up with a double possessive in those cases. And a range of reference that can be exploited, as notice the difference between "fan" and "friend". The relation of "fan" and that of "friend" are very different; friendship is reciprocal, whereas fanship isn't. And the "person" one is a fan of is not really a person, but a persona a projected image, a kind of a thing. So it can take the "of" genitive without feeling so strange.
Isn't syntax fun?
-John Lawler http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler U Michigan Linguistics Dept "You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it." G.K. Chesterton

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[nq:1]Isn't syntax fun?[/nq]
I'm a fan of its.

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[nq:1]So we wind up with a double possessive in those cases. And a range of reference that can be exploited, ... a projected image, a kind of a thing. So it can take the "of" genitive without feeling so strange.[/nq]
I took the "non-person" "fan of Mozart" version to be an indication that here "Mozart" probably meant the body of work rather than "the star as object" (which if somebody hasn't already coined, they should have).
[nq:1]Isn't syntax fun?[/nq]
Yes.
Mike.

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[nq:1]From an article by Dominick Dunne in the current Vanity Fair: "I've always been a fan of Martha Stewart's, full ... fan of Martha Stewart's" but is it more approriate, or correct or what-have-you, or is Dunne in the clear?[/nq]
I read it as a "I am a fan of Martha Stewart's (work)" where the "work", or whatever, is left unstated.

Richard Bollard
Canberra, Australia

...of Martha Stewart's

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