Grammar ?: "of his" or "of him"?

I think I would say:
“I went to the movies with my cousin and a friend of his.”

But I’d also say:
“His drinking will be the death of him.”

Am I gramatically correct in both cases? And what’s the rule that determines whether it’s “of his” or “of him”? I’m just going with what sounds right.

Based on looking at the sentences, I’m wondering if it’s always “the ___ of him” but “a ___ of his.” But that’s just a guess, as I don’t think I’ve ever learned the real rule.

I’m not sure off the top of my head whether sentence 1 is grammatically correct, though I’d certainly rewrite it to say “I went to the movies with my cousin and his friend.”

Absolutely, both are correct.

What you’re looking at is a form we use without recognizing it as something distinct, called the Partitive Genitive.

“He was just one of the boys.” Do “the boys” possess something that makes him “one”? No; what you’re saying is that he is a single member taken in isolation from a total group specified by the “of” construction.

Where this gets interesting is that Modern English permits synecdochal constructions where the modifier stands for the whole, and the modifier may be a possessive in its own right.

Winston Churchill was the subject of numerous portraits over his long and illustrious public career. He was also a fairly gifted amateur painter (there’s something ironic in the fact that both he and Hitler, the two men who effectively defined World War II in Europe, both were public men who painted for pleasure).

So we have the interesting construction that “a painting of Churchill” means “a portrait of which Winston Churchill is the subject, painted by someone else” while “a painting of Churchill**'s**” means “a still life or landscape taken from among the ouevre produced by Churchill himself for pleasure.”

“…my cousin and a friend of his” means “my cousin, and one person from among his coterie of friends” – it’s a partitive genitive, and “a friend of him” is incorrect, while “his friend” tends to imply that either he has only one friend or that this friend is someone special.

“…the death of him” – which is idiomatic, by the way – contains no partitiveness. He has only one death impending, it’s not one death from among his many deaths. (We assume against reincarnation for purposes of this grammatic analysis. :)) Therefore “him” rather than “his” is the proper pronoun.

Yes, you are right in both cases. However, I’m not sure that these examples require the depth of analysis that the mighty Polycarp has so delightfully brought to bear!

In the first case, there is an implied question about possession: “Whose friend was it? His friend? Your friend?” Because this is a question about possession, a possessive pronoun is required to answer it, so we use “his”. (At least in as far as one may be said to ‘possess’ one’s friends.)

In the second case, there is no implied question of possession. It’s simply a case of using the objective form of the pronoun, “him”, rather than the subjective form “he”, because the person is not the subject of the phrase.

Thanks for the answers, everyone. I can now say I understand the English language a little better than I did yesterday. :slight_smile:

I have been reflecting on the mighty Poly’s judgement that “a friend of him” is incorrect. (Dangerous word incorrect!)

Take the following sentence: “She was a friend of them both”. You will notice that this sounds fine; indeed, it sounds better than “… a friend of theirs both”. Okay, so this probably has something to do with the presence of the word “both”, whose function here is described by the Collins COBUILD Dictionary as an “emphasising pronoun”.

So, let’s delete the “both”, which gives us “She was a friend of them”. I think it can be argued that there is a potential difference in meaning between this and “I was a friend of theirs”. While the latter favours an interpretation whereby the friendly feelings belonged to “them”, the former perhaps (and especially in a careful speaker’s - think lawyer - mouth) supports an interpretation whereby the friendly feelings belonged to “her”. Now, such is the nature of friendship that it is normally assumed that feelings are held mutually on each side, but of course this needn’t be the case, and this is where I think the grammar can help us to differentiate.

Imagine the following courtroom exchange:

A: “He thought he was a friend.”
B: “A friend of who?” [hey - this is idiomatic! what else do you want? “of whom”? “of whose?”]
A: “A friend of me.”

A is able to disambiguate by using “of me” rather than “of mine”, to clarify that what he means is that he (A) never considered this fellow to be his friend. The friendly feelings belonged to him, were on his side, rather on the speaker’s.

So, substituting the third person pronoun for the first, it would be possible, and grammatical, to say “a friend of him”. Although, admittedly, most improbably in the sentence that Poly was referencing. However, if one were to hear an intelligent, articulate, grammatically- aware person, such as Poly, saying “I went to the movies with my cousin and a friend of him”, it would be unwise to rule out the possibility that he was exploiting the resources of the Englsih language to convey, very subtly, and yet very powerfully, his own opinion about the relations between his cousin and that other person!

“Incorrect” should probably have been “so awkward sounding as not to be the first thought of any fluent English speaker” – it’s of course grammatically correct but has all the spasticity-of-usage of “The only people who can lose our freedoms are we.”

I agree with Poly (who has a knowledge of grammar that leaves me in awe) - the sentences cited in the OP are each correct, and Poly’s reasoning is quite right. I would also agree that “a friend of me” is ungrammatical, despite the interesting justification above, since that distinction could be a useful one but I can’t imagine a native English speaker expressing it thus (and if they did, none of the listeners would understand the distinction). “A friend to me” strikes me as slightly outdated, but it’s the only concise way I can think of to express it.

I’d also like to point out that “death of him” is an idiom (as Poly noted) and doesn’t work as a pattern to form similar phrases, even ones that logically shouldn’t use the partitive genitive. For instance, if I loathe a friend’s husband, I couldn’t say “I hate that husband of her!” even though the use of the partitive genitive (“I hate that husband of hers!”) seems to imply that she has more than one of them. You simply can’t use “of [PERSONAL PRONOUN]” to form possessives in English - it is absurd and awkward to use such a construction instead of a normal possessive pronoun (“I hate her husband!”). I suspect this holds true of nouns in general (“I hate that husband of Maria!” is suspect at best). Instead, you must use the regular possessive suffix, and say “I hate Maria’s husband!” or employ the partitive genitive.

You can use such constructions, however, in Spanish (where forming possessives with “de” is much more productive) in order to differentiate between different people - “la coche de ella” (the car of her) is perfectly fine if you need to differentiate it from “the car of him”, since the third person possessive pronoun is the same in both cases.

“A friend of them both” does indeed work for me, but I suspect that it’s only used because no good alternative exists, since “Them both’s friend” and “Both of them’s friend” and such are ungrammatical. There’s a lot of similar situations in which adding and deleting words unpredictably yields ungrammatical sentences. Grammaticality is only usefully defined in terms of how a native speaker might successfully express their thoughts; heuristics that involve chopping words out are a favorite tool of the Fourth Grade Teacher Brigade, but they can’t be taken as explanations of grammaticality or ungrammaticality. They just don’t work that way. After all, “Me and him went to the store” is perfectly grammatical in casual registers (yes, really. Native speakers say it, and it comes naturally, and listeners understand what they mean.) but deleting either pronoun results in something ungrammatical. I can’t quite explain what principle permits the use of objective pronouns when glued together this way, but it works.