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

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...>
wrote:

> I'd say that in a language like that -s is already a free-floating
> enclitic rather than an inflection. The fact that "everybody"

would

> analyse <Peters> as one word is hardly relevant. Orthography and
> grammatical tradition certainly play a role here. English <king's>

is

> also called a genitive in all handbooks of English grammar, but it
> certainly doesn't function in the same way as Old English

<cyninges>

> even if there is historical continuity between them. What's

crucially

> important is that we don't say *King's Alfred's (<Ælfredes

cyninges>)

> any more -- not because multiple marking is forbidden (if this

were so,

> we'd expect to find at least some dialects allowing such a

construction

> amongst those that permit multiple negation or double gradation)

but

> because "the genitive" is now a phrasal phenomenon, more syntactic

than

> morphological. [[King Alfred]'s] is similar to [of [King Alfred]]

except

> that it involves a postposition.

I have read this several times and thought a lot about it, and I
have to give in. That indeed seems to be the only consistent
synchronic analysis. It means that clitics can not only arise from
full words that are reduced in status, but also the other way
around, from desinences that grow into more independent units. I
wonder if that possibility has not been overlooked in cases where it
would have provided solutions.

Jens