On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 08:54:34 +0000, petegray
<
petegray@...> wrote:
>
>>> "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*.
>
>It has the same meaning as a genitive case, so I suppose you're right. But
>if you call it a "genitive", tout simple, and pretend that all descriptions
>of the genitive case apply to it, you will make mistakes. You will also
>have no way of explaining why the form "Bill's" must come before the noun,
>but the form "of Bill" must come after - unless you do make some formal
>distinction between them!
In the context of word order typology it's customary to use
the term G (genitive) for all such constructions. E.g. from
Comrie's "Language Universals and Language Typology", p.
90-91:
"Completing our list of constituents of the noun phrase is
the relative order of possessive (genitive) G and head noun
(N), again giving two possible orders, GN and NG. The
former is illustrated by Turkish <kadIn-In çavug~-u> "the
woman's chicken", literally 'woman-GENITIVE chicken-her';
the latter is illustrated by French <la plume de ma tante>
'the pen of my aunt' or Welsh <het y dyn> 'the man's hat',
literally 'hat the man'. [...] English [...] has two
possessive constructions, the prenominal Saxon genitive,
e.g. <the man's hat>, and the postnominal Norman genitive,
e.g. <the roof of the house>."
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...