I would like to know the correct usage when referring to the personal experience that belongs to a robot, is it:
- Manifestation of robot's personal experience
- Manifestation of robot personal experience
?
From a simple Google search, the word robot's experience seems to be used frequently.
And also robot experience sounds a bit weird to me.
From this website, it is mentioned that apostrophe s is used to show that something belongs to someone or something. But I don't understand why the sentence "Britain’s coastline is very beautiful"
is acceptable, but "the door’s handle" is not.
Can anyone give clear explanation about this?
Best Answer
Both the door handle and the door's handle are possible. When do we use the one over the other? That's an interesting question.
The palace was one grotesque extravagance after another. There was even a golden toilet. The toilet's handle was decorated with diamonds.
In the sentence above, we are considering the handle as a feature of that toilet in particular, hence the possessive.
He groped in the dark for the door handle.
In the sentence above, we are simply referring to the object that people grasp to open a door, not as a particular feature of that door; hence the use of the noun 'door' used attributively. You can think of 'door' there as if it were attached to the handle (literally and linguistically):
door-handle
P.S. In fact, it used to common to connect an adjunct noun to the main noun with a hyphen, though that practice seems to be falling out of use.