Is ending a sentence with a possessive considered informal? [closed]

Question

Does corpora show any genre preferences for ending sentences with a nominal possessive? Does it occur more in spoken and informal written texts than in academic texts?

I really appreciate your input.

Answer 1

Here are the number of times that each possessive pronoun appeared at the end of each sentence in the British National Corpus per million words:

        spoken  fiction magazine    newspaper   non-acad    academic    misc
hers    3.41    37.97   1.79        1.62        0.67        0.98        1.39
his     6.62    39.47   3.03        3.63        1.64        2.09        4.22
mine    39.14   38.97   6.33        4.20        4.85        1.17        6.82
yours   17.86   21.43   3.72        1.53        1.21        0.39        3.22
its     0.10    0.06    0.00        0.10        0.12        0.13        0.05
theirs  2.81    4.78    3.03        2.39        2.12        2.09        3.31
ours    10.74   5.15    3.44        2.58        2.36        1.30        2.93
's      15.16   90.32   36.63       28.66       18.49       14.02       26.78

As you can see, academic texts consistently do this less often than do other texts. On the surface, this seems to indicate that the question to your question is 'yes'. But is it really so?

This table does not take into account one important factor: The prevalence of these possessive pronouns in the first place (irrespective of context). It turns out that possessive pronouns are less common in academic writing in the first place (I exclude his and its since they may not be pronouns):

        spoken  fiction magazine    newspaper   non-acad    academic    misc
hers    18.87   115.47  7.30        5.73        3.39        3.07        5.47
yours   100.77  84.48   26.99       8.31        15.10       3.85        53.76
mine    196.71  115.53  41.17       28.57       41.41       10.11       39.98
theirs  14.65   13.39   10.74       7.74        7.94        6.65        10.80
ours    65.94   17.79   11.84       9.55        9.09        6.65        13.44

By inspection, the ratios seem fairly consistent across the two tables, so there seems to be little basis for saying that the possessive pronoun is less likely to appear at the end of a sentence in academic writing. (If you're not convinced, I could do some statistical analysis later...)