Deflexion and the development of the genitive in English Research on this paper was partially funded by Australian Research Council Discovery Grant DP0208153. My thanks to two anonymous English Language and Linguistics referees who commented on an earlier draft.

Abstract

This article looks at the role of deflexion in the development of the genitive in English and offers an empirical base for evaluating some claims which have been made about how this development proceeded. It focuses primarily on the claim that it was impossible for the genitive to remain as a morphological case once the other case distinctions were lost in the nominal system. This claim is based on a dubious typological argument and evidence is presented that the genitive retained some inflectional characteristics in Middle English. The article also looks at how the so-called 'his genitive' found in some earlier texts fits into the general picture of the development of English possessives.

The participle in two corpora of Old English. Descriptive and empirical questions

“…In this respect, the degree of variation shown in Old English by the adjectival inflection of the present and the past participle is not matched by the declension of the adjective, which remains stable throughout the period. Therefore, while it is worth while looking at the variation of the participle in Old English, the outcome of the evolution as attested by Present-Day English demonstrates that variation has resulted in a morphological change that can be described as the partial deflexion (Norde, 2001;Allen, 2003) of the participle involving the loss of adjectival morphology.…”