Germanic possessive -s : an empirical, historical and theoretical study
Two much-debated questions in recent theoretical linguistics concern the historical origin of grammatical markers and their synchronic status. Researchers have adduced key evidence for both from the evolution of English possessive -s and the related but subtly different constructions in Swedish and Dutch. What has not to date been attempted, and what the present proposal offers, is a systematic synchronic and diachronic comparison of these constructions across all three languages. The aim is threefold: to provide a consistent multi-lingual dataset; to compare detailed historical trajectories; to develop a theoretical account of these items within a typology of grammatical markers. The basic method will be to extract examples systematically from existing databases of present-day English and Swedish. The historical part of the project will be based largely on existing studies, supplemented by use of historical corpora when required.
Project
arts-humanities.net
Papers:
Börjars, Kersti, David Denison & Alan Scott. in prep. Expression of possession: Structural factors. To appear in Börjars, Denison & Scott (eds.).
Börjars, Kersti & Pauline Harries. 2008. The clitic-affix distinction, historical change, and Scandinavian bound definiteness marking. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 20, 289-350.
Denison, David, Alan Scott & Kersti Börjars. to appear. The real distribution of the English "group genitive". Studies in Language.
Scott, Alan, Kersti Börjars & David Denison. submitted. The development of possessive constructions in the Germanic languages.
Book:
Börjars, Kersti, David Denison & Alan Scott (eds.). in prep. Morphosyntactic categories and the expression of possession. Amsterdam and Philadelphia PA: John Benjamins.
Conference presentations:
Börjars, Kersti, David Denison & Alan Scott. 2007. Dimensions of clitics. LAGB, King's College London, 31 August 2007.
Börjars, Kersti, David Denison & Alan Scott. 2008. What makes clitics tick? IMM 13, University of Vienna, 3-6 February 2008.
Börjars, Kersti, David Denison & Alan Scott. 2009. Expression of possession: structural factors. Morpho-syntactic categories and the expression of possession, 3-4 April 2009, The University of Manchester. http://www.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/medialibrary/llc/files/possessives/Borjars&Denison&Scott.pdf
Denison, David, Alan Scott & Kersti Börjars. 2008. What's wrong with possessive 's? ISLE1, University of Freiburg, 8-11 October 2008. http://www.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/medialibrary/llc/files/possessives/ISLE1_Freiburg.pdf
Harries, Pauline. 2008. Double definiteness and the Faroese Noun Phrase. 3rd Newcastle Postgraduate Conference in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 9 July 2008.
Harries, Pauline. 2008. The Faeroese sa(r) and the s-possessive. 23rd Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics, Uppsala University, 1-3 October 2008.
Scott, Alan, David Denison & Kersti Börjars. 2007. Is the English possessive 's truly a right edge phenomenon? The Second International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (ICLCE2), University of Toulouse-le Mirail, 2 July 2007. http://www.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/medialibrary/llc/files/possessives/poss-iclce-2.pdf
Scott, Alan, Kersti Börjars & David Denison. 2009. The development of possessive expressions in the Germanic languages. 19ICHL, Radboud University Nijmegen, 10-14 August 2009. http://www.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/medialibrary/llc/files/possessives/19ICHL_Nijmegen.pdf