Re: Re[2]: [tied] Evening/Night (was Re: The "Mother" Problem)

----- Original Message -----

From: Brian M. Scott

To: petegray

Sent: Saturday, February 12, 2005 9:30 AM

Subject: Re[2]: [tied] Evening/Night (was Re: The "Mother" Problem)

At 7:51:39 AM on Friday, February 11, 2005, petegray wrote:

>> AfaIk, "Bill's" or "the king of England's" are
>> postpositional phrases and "Bill's hat" is a noun phrase.

> Now that's an interesting analysis! Do you believe there
> is a postposition "s" in English?

> I find this hard to accept because "s" has no independent
> existence. I'd prefer to see it either as a bound morpheme
> or a case ending.

Matthew Dryer classifies it as a clitic for the purposes of
his typological database.

Brian

 

 

Any outrageous idea has it partisan in linguistics.

 

The apostrophe simply indicates a former letter/sound which is not pronounced. <it's> for <it is>, etc.

The English genitive ending was formerly <-es> after consonants. When it began to be abbreviated to <-s> in pronunciation after most consonants, the former <-e-> was remembered as <'>. Even where the former <-es> is still pronounced (ex. <goose's> /gus6z/), analogy insists on the abbreviated spelling.

<'s> is simply a genitive ending.

 

 

Patrick

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