At 3:23:01 AM on Wednesday, February 9, 2005, petegray
wrote:
>> English has two genitive constructions (one GN, the other
>> NG), so English is of little relevance in this matter.
> No. "Bill's hat" is possible in English, but *"hat Bill's"
> is not. The other construction is a prepositional phrase,
> not a genitive.
It's still a genitive *construction*. E.g., quoted from
'Functionalism and the Metalanguage - Theory Confusion',
Matthew S. Dryer,
<linguistics.buffalo.edu/people/faculty/dryer/dryer/metalanguage.pdf>:
For example, in English, we can express possession by
means of either the left-branching prenominal genitive, as
in (1), or the right-branching postnominal genitive, as in
(2).
(1) [[John]s brother]s car
(2) the car of [the brother of [John]]
(Also mentions the obvious mixed forms of genitive.)
Brian