John his book vs. John's book : possession marking in English

  • The unusual development of the PDE [present-day English] s-genitive can be historically motivated, if the 's form is supposed to be not a mere leftover of the Old English (henceforth OE) casemarking, but the outcome of the merging of two patterns: the inflectional genitive ending (levelled to -s) and the construction "John his book" (henceforth 'possessive-linked genitive') during the Middle and the Early Modem English phases. As my corpus analysis will show, the semantic and syntactic constraints ruling the occurrence of the 's pattern in the time interval of the rise of the 's-pattern (1400 - 1650) are the same ones as those ruling the occurrence of the possessive-linked genitive. This hypothesis is further confirmed by cross-language comparison (with the other West Germanic languages, especially Afrikaans).

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Metadaten
Author:Letizia Vezzosi
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-307178
URL:http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/211.html
ISSN:1435-9588
ISSN:0947-7055
Parent Title (English):Papers on language change and language acquisition, Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung, Berlin, 2000; ZAS papers in linguistics Vol. 15
Publisher:Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung
Place of publication:Berlin
Document Type:Part of a Book
Language:English
Date of Publication (online):2013/10/17
Year of first Publication:2000
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2013/10/17
GND Keyword:Englisch; Markiertheit; Genitiv; Flexion
Volume:15
Page Number:31
First Page:168
Last Page:198
HeBIS-PPN:378259113
Dewey Decimal Classification:4 Sprache / 42 Englisch, Altenglisch / 420 Englisch, Altenglisch
Sammlungen:Linguistik
Linguistik-Klassifikation:Linguistik-Klassifikation: Sprachtypologie / Language typology
Linguistik-Klassifikation: Morphologie / Morphology
Linguistik-Klassifikation: Grammatikforschung / Grammar research
Zeitschriften / Jahresberichte:ZAS papers in linguistics : ZASPiL / ZASPiL 15 = Papers on language change and language acquisition
:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-306575
Licence (German):License LogoDeutsches Urheberrecht