The genitive and the category of case in the history of English

Seppänen, Aimo

doi:10.1515/9783110820751.193

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Having elsewhere discussed the general questions involved (Seppänen 1980(Seppänen , 1997b, I will here consider only the most important concrete facts which have been assumed by traditional analysts of English to require a grammatical distinction between dependent and independent his and its. The crucial point is that Mary's, his and its in (21) and (22) are said by the traditionalists to be only superficially similar, and in reality quite different.…”

Section: Independent Its Vs Dependent Itsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Genitive / Possessive Pronoun Its

Seppänen¹

2000

Studia Neophilologica

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Section: Independent Its Vs Dependent Itsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Genitive / Possessive Pronoun Its

Seppänen¹

2000

Studia Neophilologica

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“…Various studies have been carried out on the development of the genitive case in the history of English, for instance Rosenbach, 2002;Allen, 1997Allen, , 2003Seppänen, 1997;Taylor, 1996. These studies focus on the history of the case in various periods from the end of the OE 1 period onwards.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The history of the genitive case from the Old English period onwards

Koike¹

2006

English Language and Linguistics

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The history of the genitive case from Old English onwards, specifically the diversity of genitival functions in Old English, and the subsequent development of the case as determiner marker as claimed in Rosenbach (2002), can be explained coherently by assuming NP status for genitive nominals and nondistinct categorial status of the determiner class in OE. This article argues that OE, as an inflected language, encodes events in terms of roles carried by participants, and that the genitive case signalled partial or nonparticipation of a designated thing. This enabled a genitive nominal to be subordinated to another NP, which gives a coherent gestalt of the two things, and also to function as a full NP elsewhere. At the same time, the loose categorial status of determiners made it possible for a genitive nominal in prenominal position to function as a determiner. After the OE period, the determiner category became more distinct from others, and a genitive nominal, being a member of this category, ceased to be able to function as NP.

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“…Allen, 1997;Ekwall, 1943Ekwall, , 1913Fischer, 1992;Furnivall, 1865;Janda, 1980Janda, , 1981Jespersen, 1894Jespersen, : ¶247-8, 1942: §17; Lightfoot, 1999: 117-25;Mustanoja, 1960: 159-66;Seppänen, 1997, to name only a few of the important older studies and some more recent works, excluding those which focus on the use of the prenominal genitive versus the of construction). As Otto Jespersen pointed out long ago, the possessive marker in English is different from an ordinary inflection; it does not necessarily attach to the possessor noun, but rather to the end of a 'syntactic group', i.e.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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.

Allen

2003

English Language and Linguistics

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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.

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The genitive and the category of case in the history of English

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

The Genitive / Possessive Pronoun Its

The Genitive / Possessive Pronoun Its

The history of the genitive case from the Old English period onwards

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.

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