Leipzig fourmille de typologues: Genitive objects in comparison (2008) (original) (raw)
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Leipzig fourmille de typologues : Genitive objects in comparison
Typological Studies in Language, 2008
This paper examines genitive objects in a range of familiar European languages, in particular German, English, Latin, French and Italian. Three initial examples are given in (1)-(3) (in each case, the genitive object is in boldface). (1) French Claire fleurit le balcon de géraniums. 'Claire plants the balcony with geraniums.' (2) Latin (Lucilius 272) quarum et abundemus rerum et quarum indigeamus 'of which things we have too many and of which we have too few' (3) German Michael gedenkt der gemeinsamen Jahre. 'Michael thinks of the years spent together.' * An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Drittes Bamberger Romanistisches Arbeitsgespräch, 12 April 1997. We thank the participants for useful discussion, especially Annegret Bollée, Peter Koch, and Max Grosse.
English is generally thought to be a morphologically rather poor language. However, its history confirms that it was not the case at the earlier stages of its progress. Old English period was characterized by the complex inflectional system with a rather free word order. This situation was gradually changing along the Middle English period, which eventually led to a rigid word order that we have in the Present-Day English. From the Old English more developed declension system there survived one leftover which is used until today, mainly the genitive case. This paper focuses on English genitive and the students of English preferences for the variants of genitive case marking.
2009
This work deals with the acquisition of L2 English 's Genitive Constructions with Bare Proper Name possessors by native speakers of Italian. We investigated original L2 English data collected through a written elicitation test from a group of 94 Italian teenagers learning L2 English in a formal environment. Results indicate that both Universal Grammar and transfer from the L1 are implied in the acquisition of these structures. In Section 1 we compare Italian and English Possessive Constructions in the light of a model of possessive DPs; in Section 2 we present the experimental design and the results, which will be discussed in Section 3.
Syntactic and Semantic Adnominal Genitive
* We would like to thank the following people for helpful comments and suggestions: Ewald Lang and Daniel Büring, as well as the audiences of GGS 2001 and WECOL 2001. 8 Most plausibly, this synchronic asymmetry has a diachronic explanation. Demske (2001, 252) proposes that the s-suffix is not an instance of genitive case but a relic from a possessive marker, which occurred prenominally. Demske's analysis is based on the observation that the prenominal genitive and the possessive shared various properties in earlier stages of German (Demske: 2001, 227). An anlogous process is still productive in Dutch. The full form Jan zijn auto 'Jan his car' often reduces to Jan z'n auto. 9 We take the schwa in Mannes and Kindes in (8) to be epenthetic.
Constructional semantics as a limit to grammatical alternation: The two genitives of English
It has often been claimed that the distribution of the s-genitive and the of-genitive is determined by considerations of information structure, more specifically by linear precedence preferences related to animacy, givenness, or syntactic weight. This paper shows that such claims are untenable on empirical as well as theoretical grounds. First, corpus analyses simply do not bear out the predictions made by these claims. Second, such claims assume that the two genitives are semantically equivalent. I show that this assumption is wrong and offer a systematic account of the s-genitive and the of-genitive as distinct semantic-role constructions, arguing that the former encodes a possessor-possessee relation and the latter a part-whole relation unless the head noun itself inherently specifies a different relation. Only in the case of such an inherently specified relation does the possibility arise that information structure may play a role. I then show that in such cases animacy and (to a lesser degree) length have an influence, but that givenness has an optional stylistic influence at best.
Genitive Constructions in English and Arabic: A Contrastive Study
This paper offers a contrastive analysis of the genitive constructions in English and Standard Arabic. It aims at showing the similarities and differences between the two languages in such constructions from the morphological, syntactic and semantic perspectives. It starts with a definition of the term genitive and the various parts in a genitive construction. Then, a brief discussion of the traditional classification of genitive constructions is provided. After that, genitive constructions are dealt with from a morphological perspective. Furthermore, the syntactic structure of genitive phrases is contrasted in both languages. In addition, a semantic classification of genitive constructions in both languages will be provided. Finally, a summary of the convergences and divergences of genitive constructions in the two languages is given in the conclusion.