From: Exu Yangi
Message: 36418
Date: 2005-02-21
>--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...>IN quite a few IE languages (both living and dead) the genitive is used to
>wrote:
>
> > An inflected phrase is something of an oxymoron. To be sure,
>affixations
> > can be derived from a phrase in English, e.g. <South American> <--
> > [[South America] -an], or <do-gooder> <-- [[do good] -er] provided
>that
> > the phrase itself is a sufficiently fixed one (a stable
>collocation, and
> > arguably a lexical item). The "Saxon genitive" <'s>, by contrast,
>can
> > follow just any kind of noun phrase, not only a set one, as in
><the
> > Queen of England's> but also an arbitrary one, like <my poor
>deceased
> > uncle Jerome's>. In my opinion, it's preferable to regard <'s> as
>an
> > enclitic postposition, and the Modern English genitive as an
>analytic
> > construction. The whole question is mainly a terminological one,
>but I'm
> > opposed to using the term "inflection" too loosely, since if we do
>so,
> > some important typological distinctions become blurred.
>
>
>But what do we do if a linguistic community does not care about this
>and blurs things anyway? Do we then say they didn't do that?
>
>In my language, which is Danish, this happens quite regularly: Take
>a noun phrase like <ham du ved vi s� i g�r> "the one you know we saw
>yesterday"; now suppose that person forgot an umbrella here and
>someone asks whose umbrella it is, then the only unforced reply will
>be <ham du ved vi s� i g�rs> "the one you know we saw yesterday's",
>with an -s hanging on the adverb.
>
>How is this analyzed? If the umbrella belonged to an already-known
>person by the name of <Peter>, the response would be <Peters>, and
>everybody would say <Peters> is the genitive of <Peter>. Now, the
>functional relationship between <Peter> and <Peters> is exactly the
>same as the one obtaining between <ham du ved vi s� i g�r> and <ham
>du ved vi s� i g�rs> - and the formal relationship is also the same.
>That looks like valid reason to treat them in a parallel manner.