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Morphological Variation: Theoretical and empirical perspectives
Edited by Antje Dammel and Oliver Schallert
[Studies in Language Companion Series 207] 2019
► pp. 27–62

Possessive -s in German

Development, variation and theoretical status

| FU Berlin

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
Published online: 27 June 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.207.02ack
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