Re[4]: [tied] Evening/Night (was Re: The "Mother" Problem)

At 6:22:09 PM on Saturday, February 12, 2005, Patrick Ryan
wrote:

>> 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.

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

Clearly not in the plural possessive, e.g., <wolves'>.

> The English genitive ending was formerly <-es> after
> consonants.

The one that was generalized, you mean.

> 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.

In fact forms without the <e> were common for quite a while
before the apostrophe became the normal usage. It appears
to me that the main driving force in the adoption of the
possessive apostrophe was a desire unambiguously to
distinguish possessives from plurals.

> <'s> is simply a genitive ending.

In <the king of England's daughter>?

Brian