On the role of cases and possession in Germanic
A typological approach
The Germanic languages exhibit several interesting developments with respect to genitive and ‘possession’. The genitive cannot be considered a structural case in line with the nominative or accusative, the function of which can often be expressed by word order alone. It has a very complex semantic status in its own right and shows several intersections with the semantics of the dative, also a formerly complex case. The transfer of possessive datives from Low German into the Mainland Scandinavian languages led, however, to language-internal typological inconsistency, as far as the possessive pronouns (3rd person) are concerned. Moreover, ‘possession’ may also be rendered through periphrastic constructions which display various realisations in the Scandinavian languages. Special emphasis is paid to the word order within noun phrases and to distributional restrictions. Morphological transparency, the emergence of a new possessive clitic (-sa) in Faroese and the inter/independency of pre- and postposed possessive constructions are also investigated. The conclusion focuses on the issue of whether these developments may be seen as a “progress in language” (Jespersen 1894) or rather as a “helix in language history” (von der Gabelentz 1901).
Article outline
- 1.Introduction – road map
- 2.Structural vs. non-structural cases
- 3.On the history and hierarchy of cases
- 3.1On the nature of cases in Germanic
- 3.2Polyfunctionality
- 4.Inflectional morphology and semantic markedness
- 4.1Inflectional marking
- 4.2Reflexivity in pronominal systems
- 5.Morphological transparency, emphasis and periphrastic constructions
- 5.1Morphological marking
- 5.2The emergence of a new morphological marker in Faroese
- 5.3More transparency through prepositional phrases
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6.Genitival and periphrastic constructions, seen from a typological perspective
- 6.1Typological differences between West and North Germanic
- 6.2Restrictions within genitive NPs
- 7.Branching and weight in genitival noun phrases
- 7.1Left branching and group genitives
- 7.2Right branching and possession
- 8.Conclusions
- 8.1On the helix in language history („Vom Spirallauf der Sprachgeschichte“)
- 8.2Overlapping grammatical functions and their consequences
- 8.2.1Grammatical overspecification and linguistic complexity
- 8.2.2Grammatical underspecification
- 8.3Progress in language evolution?
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Acknowledgements
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Notes
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Primary sources
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References
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List of index word