possessives - Why do we say a "hotel room" and not a "hotel's room"?



I would like to know what the rule is to explain why we do not use the genitive construction hotel's room. Instead, we say "a hotel room".


Other examples:



  • a hospital bed

  • a bike stand


Would it suffice to ask "What kind of..."?



Answer



Your examples use nouns that are used to modify other nouns (attributive nouns). Possessive (also called Saxon Genitive) constructions, on the other hand, show possession [in the extended (my bike's front wheel) rather than just the proprietorial (John's bike) sense].


"a hotel's room" - a room belonging to a hotel


"a hotel room" - a specific type of room, somehow related to hotels (in this case also usually belonging to the hotel but that is not necessarily important)


similarly "hospital's bed", vs "hospital bed"


"the bike's stand" would imply that the stand belongs to the bike while "bike stand" describes a type of stand that is somehow related to bikes.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

commas - Does this sentence have too many subjunctives?

verbs - "Baby is creeping" vs. "baby is crawling" in AmE

time - English notation for hour, minutes and seconds

etymology - Origin of "s--t eating grin"

grammatical number - Use of lone apostrophe for plural?

etymology - Where does the phrase "doctored" originate?

single word requests - What do you call hypothetical inhabitants living on the Moon?