Possessives and determiners in Old English (original) (raw)

This paper investigates the properties of two constructions in Old English (OE) in which a possessive and a determiner co-occur. The Det Poss construction, in which the determiner precedes a possessive, is well known and is similar to constructions found in many other languages. The Poss Det construction, with the opposite order, is much less well documented and when discussed at all, has usually been treated as a variant of the Det Poss construction. However, a systematic examination of a large corpus shows that the two constructions had different properties and require different analyses. I argue that the typologically unusual Poss Det construction, found only with adjectives, was possible because adjective phrases could be complements to determiners in OE.