Incorrect Possessive (adv3Lite)

Authoring TADS
1

I have a CollectiveGroup, Actor whose printed name is “card players”. It’s identified in the code as plural. But this is the output:

>talk to men
You now have the card players’s attention.

I don’t see anything in the Thing class that would allow me to adjust the possessive. In grammar.t there are a number of uses of tokApostropheS, which I would guess is being used here when it oughtn’t to be, but tokApostropheS is not to be found in the “all symbols” area of the Library Reference Manual (presumably because it’s in the English module) and seems not to be defined anywhere in grammar.t, nor do I see how to create another such macro and apply it when the possessive of a particular noun is being generated. It would have to go into a property of the plural noun, right?

Can anyone suggest how I can produce the output without the extra s at the end?

2

It looks to me that this response is coming from this line in actor.t:

    noHelloResponseMsg = BMsg(no hello response, '{I} now {have} {1} attention.
        ', possAdj)

Can you just override possAdj for that object?

  possAdj = 'the card players\''

(Docs.)

(Never done this before, so curious if it’s just this easy.)

3 Likes
3

That works perfectly – thanks! I didn’t know about possAdj.

2 Likes