grammar - Possession and personification


Is the act of possessing an example of personification if attributed to inanimate objects? Here, "possession" means the possession of physical things as well as the possession of virtues or qualities by any inanimate object.


For example, is the sentence "The book's cover is pretty old." an example of personification? (I am unsure whether the apostrophe usage in case of inanimate objects is grammatically correct.) Possession, according to me, is as much a human quality as it is a natural phenomenon (natural as in applicable to all objects). This should mean that inanimate objects can possess things and qualities without being personified.


A related question is, if we ascribe the 'action' of possessing to a synecdochic reference to a human, will that be an instance of personification, now that the object to which the possession is attributed is not technically speaking, inanimate? For example, "His stomach's capacity is exhausted." or "The last remaining relic of his brain's prowess was steadily depleting."



Answer




personification - A trope or figure of speech (generally considered a type of metaphor) in which an inanimate object or abstraction is given human qualities or abilities.


English possessive - Nouns ... form a possessive with the suffix -'s ... sometimes called the Saxon genitive, reflecting the suffix's derivation from a genitive case ending in Old English.


genitive (also called the possessive or second case) - the grammatical case that marks a noun as modifying another noun. It often marks a noun as being the possessor of another noun; however, it can also indicate various other relationships than possession.




It would be ridiculous to say that when we refer to the river's edge, for example, we're assigning human qualities to the river just because it can have an edge. And with, say, a day's work, it's hardly even possible to think of the day as "having" work. The possessive apostrophe doesn't necessarily imply "ownership" - often it just denotes some kind of association.



OP's "related" question presupposes the false idea that possessive apostrophe = personification.


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