Possessive -s in German
Development, variation and theoretical status
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 possessive -s is going through a similar, though less radical change as its Germanic counterparts, resulting in morphosyntactic variation. This high amount of synchronic and diachronic variation makes it hard to categorize -s in German. However, the marker can best be described as a bound element that gradually loses its paradigmaticity. This gradual rather than categorial change in progress on an affix-clitic-continuum challenges both synchronic as well as diachronic morpheme-based theoretical approaches.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Empirical analysis
- 2.1The development of the superstable marker -s
- 2.1.1Paradigmatic deflexion
- 2.1.2Syntagmatic deflexion
- 2.2The current occurrences of possessive -s
- 2.3A contrastive comparison with English and Dutch
- 3.Theoretical considerations
- 3.1Morphological status of possessive -s
- 3.2Consequences for synchronic syntactic modelling
- 3.3Implications for diachronic modelling
- 3.3.1Degrammaticalization
- 3.3.2Constructionalization
- 3.3.3Exaptation
- 4.Conclusion
-
Notes
-
Corpora
-
References
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