In #94 we started looking at contractions. In #114 we looked at contractions of the word not. In #118 we looked at contractions of auxiliaries other than those involving apostrophe-s.

In this beanbag, we’ll look at apostrophe-s.

There are 2,305 occurrences of an apostrophe-s in Project Hail Mary.

But there is an ambiguity in apostrophe-s. It’s used for contracting is or has. It is also used to mark possession. It can be used to contract us in things like “Let’s see”. It can even be used to pluralize a unit in things like “1.5 g’s”.

We have not manually gone through and annotated each case but we can get a pretty good idea of how many of each there are using part-of-speech tagging.

There are 1,822 cases where ’s is contracting a verb (is or has). We may explore these further in a future beanbag.

There are 441 cases where ’s is marking possession. We’ll look at what nouns precede that in a future beanbag.

There are 31 cases where ’s is contracting us and in every case, it’s preceded by “let”. We’ll look at what verbs follow that in a future beanbag.

There are also 11 cases where an apostrophe-s is used to pluralize the unit g.