I notice that in some cases people skip the 's in the possessive case. But I cannot understand what rule they use.
For example:
- attribute declaration, but not attribute's declaration or declaration of attributes
- pet cemetery (name of the book), but not cemetery of pets.
Explain please how should I do it correctly?
Answer
The Saxon genitive (as we call the use of an apostrophe and the letter s to denote possession) is not skipped or omitted in the usages you cite.
Instead, the nouns attribute and pet are used as noun adjuncts or attributive nouns to modify the nouns which they precede.
Some other common examples are:
- rose bush
- chicken soup
- pocket watch
- horse farm
There is a Wikipedia article on the noun adjunct here. (Note that the article is in the process of being improved to reflect modern linguistic terminology; however, it does explain the concept succinctly.)
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