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Deflexion and the Development of the Genitive in English English Language and Linguistics 7.1: 1–28. C Cambridge University Press 2003 DOI: 10.1017/S1360674303211023 Printed in the United Kingdom Deflexion and the development of the genitive in English1 CYNTHIA L. ALLEN Australian National University (Received 12 December 2001; revised 24 July 2002) 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. 1Introduction The development of the genitive in English has long been a subject of interest to students of the history of English (see e.g. Allen, 1997; Ekwall, 1943, 1913; Fischer, 1992; Furnivall, 1865; Janda, 1980, 1981; Jespersen, 1894: ¶247–8, 1942: §17; Lightfoot, 1999: 117–25; Mustanoja, 1960: 159–66; Seppanen,¨ 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. the NP containing the possessor, as in the ‘group genitive’2 of (1): (1) the king of England’s daughter This development is of interest to linguists generally because, as Janda (1980, 1981) notes, such a development seems to present difficulties for Givon’s´ (1971) famous dictum ‘today’s morphology is yesterday’s syntax’. The English ‘group genitive’ has continued to be a topic of considerable debate in the recent literature on grammaticalization (see e.g. Lehmann, 1995; Janda, 2001; Norde, 2001; Tabor & Traugott, 1998) because of the questions it raises for the ‘unidirectionality’ hypothesis, i.e. that the direction of grammatical change is always from more lexical to more grammatical. 1 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. 2 My use of the term ‘group genitive’ will not cover appositives such as ‘King Henry the Eighth’s wives’, as these are syntactically different, as will be shown below. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.19, on 30 Sep 2021 at 01:18:42, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360674303211023 2CYNTHIA L. ALLEN It may seem as if there is little more of value to be said about this construction. However, the recent literature on the matter includes a typological claim which merits examination. This claim concerns the case-marking systems which are humanly possible and has been used to argue that the Middle English (ME) genitive could not have been a case inflection because of the deflexion which had occurred. Much of the discussion has been very schematic, and the more theoretical works in particular lack sufficient detail about earlier stages of English to make the analysis of any given stage convincing. This article examines the development of prenominal genitives in English on the basis of data gained from a systematic investigation of fifty-three texts (detailed in the Appendix). Section 2 briefly surveys analyses of the possessive marker in Present-day English (PDE), as this bears on the question of what changes we want to say have taken place. Section 3 looks in detail at genitives in ME. Its primary focus is on the question of how deflexion affected genitives, particularly in Early Middle English (EME). Section 4 looks briefly at the further development of the prenominal genitives in Early Modern English (EModE) and specifically at the possible relationship between the agreeing prenominal periphrastic genitive which arose at that period and the group genitive. 2 The genitive in PDE One problem we have when trying to figure out how the OE genitive case turned into the modern possessive marker is that there is no unanimity among syntacticians and morphologists concerning how to analyse the PDE genitive. There is general agreement that the possessive marker is unlike a typical inflectional affix because of the existence of group genitives. But there is a great deal of difference in the analyses which have been offered. There is not even agreement that the possessive marker should be called a clitic. Zwicky (1987) argues that the possessive marker is ‘an edge-located inflectional affix’, a position which he notes (139) calls into doubt the very existence of phrasal affix clitics. If we adopt Zwicky’sanalysis, there has obviously been no switch from inflection to clitic with the English possessive, although there have been important changes to the distribution of the inflection. See also Seppanen’s¨ (1997: 205–9) discussion of the affixal characteristics of the PDE genitive and Plank (1992) on its categorially ‘fuzzy’ status. Sadock (1991), arguing against a sharp distinction between inflectional suffixes and clitics, proposes a framework in which this affix can be treated as involving a mismatch of the syntax and the morphology; morphologically, the possessive marker is part of the word to which it attaches, but it is a separate syntactic entity. Sadock’sand Zwicky’sapp- roaches share the treatment of the possessive marker as an affix, although Sadock’s is different in assuming that the marker has its own syntactic position. With Sadock’s analysis of PDE, as with any analysis which assumes a separate syntactic position for the possessive marker, we must assume that somewhere along the line in the history of English, there has been the creation of a new syntactic position for this marker. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.19, on 30 Sep 2021 at 01:18:42, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360674303211023 DEFLEXION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE GENITIVE 3 IN ENGLISH What we say about the history of the English possessive ’s will depend on our analysis of PDE. While I am not going to argue the merits of the different analyses for PDE, I will argue against analyses which involve a single reanalysis between the OE genitive inflection and a PDE clitic. Whether we treat the PDE marker as an inflection or a clitic, I will show that the possessive marker in EME was different both from the inflection of OE and the more loosely attached marker of PDE. The widely held view that deflexion in EME triggered a reanalysis of the OE inflectional genitive at a very early stage depends more for its support on typological arguments, which I will argue are dubious, than on the observable facts of the history of English. 3Genitives in ME 3.1 Deflexion in EME As is well known, EME was a period of considerable deflexion in English (see e.g. Mustanoja, 1960: 67 for an extremely general statement concerning the decay of the OE inflectional system in EME and chapter 5 of Allen, 1995 for a more detailed look at the evidence concerning deflexion in the different dialects). In particular, the distinction between the nominative, dative, and accusative was completely lost in the nominal system, and the dative/accusative distinction was lost in the pronominal system. Case agreement was lost for determiners and adjectives. These developments took place at different times and in rather different ways in different dialects, but by the mid thirteenth century we find that they are pretty much complete everywhere except in Kent. However, the genitive marker is retained, although with an important difference from OE; there is now a single dominant genitive marker, namely -(e)s,which is used for most nouns, as opposed to the OE system in which different inflectional classes had different genitive markers. At issue here is the analysis of this genitive marker; is it to be analysed the same way as the PDE possessive marker, or is it more similar to the OE inflection? 3.2 Analysing the EME genitives (1100–1300) We turn now to the genitives of EME texts which show advanced syncretism in the nominal system and advanced loss of agreement of modifiers. It is first of all important to note that the genitives of EME are different from prenominal genitives ending in -s in Modern Dutch. In Dutch, the prenominal genitives which descend directly from the old genitive case are limited to proper nouns and kinship terms such as ‘mother’, which can be used like proper nouns, as discussed by Weerman and de Wit (1999): (2)(a) Willems boek William-S book ‘William’s book’ (b) *de jongens boek the boy-S book ‘the boy’s book’ Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.19, on 30 Sep 2021 at 01:18:42, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360674303211023 4CYNTHIA L. ALLEN Weerman and de Wit argue that the possessive marker is not a genuine case marker in Dutch, and that prenominal possessives are to be analysed as complex determiners, so that recursive possessives and NPs which are not simply proper nouns are ruled out.
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