This empirical study focuses on the diachrony of adnominal genitives of proper names in (Early) New High German (17th to 19th centuries), e.g., Carls Haus vs. das Haus Carls ‘Carl’s house’. Starting from the observation that word order variation exists within the whole period investigated, the… read more
In several Germanic languages, such as English and Swedish, the former genitive morpheme -s has developed into a possessive marker, which has been described as a special clitic by some scholars. Synchronic and diachronic corpus data as well as a comparison with English and Dutch show that German… read more
This paper deals with the status of the s-marker with personal names in German from a diachronic perspective. On the basis of corpus data it is argued that the deflexion of personal names in genitive phrases is much more advanced than it has been claimed in the literature: only the invariant marker… read more
Zimmer, Christian, Horst J. Simon and Tanja Ackermann 2018 Genitives in GermanicGermanic Genitives, Ackermann, Tanja, Horst J. Simon and Christian Zimmer (eds.), pp. 3–12 | Chapter