Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T14:19:08.781Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Genitive coordinations with personal pronouns1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2011

JOHN PAYNE
JOHN PAYNE*
Affiliation:
Linguistics and English Language, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, United [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

English genitive noun-phrase coordinations follow two patterns. The first is the single genitive, in which exponence of the genitive case occurs solely on the final coordinate, e.g. Mary and Jane's; and the second is the multiple genitive, in which exponence of the genitive case occurs on all coordinates, e.g. Mary's and Jane's. When either of the coordinates is a personal pronoun, difficult choices have to be made about the form of the pronoun. These difficulties arise especially with the single genitive, which is judged to be totally ungrammatical in coordinations like *my wife and I's or *my wife and my. On the other hand, the alternative use of the multiple genitive, my wife's and my, conflicts with a preference for the single genitive when the coordinates are felt to constitute a single unit. In this article, we first conduct a corpus-based analysis for genitive coordinations with personal pronouns, based on the British National Corpus. This, supplemented by some non-standard examples from web-based sources, gives some insight into the choices actually made by native speakers. We then provide a theoretical account of the syntactic problems that genitive coordinations with pronouns create. This account is shown to be compatible solely with an analysis of the English ’s genitive as an inflectional affix.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 15 , Issue 2: The structure of the noun phrase in English: synchronic and diachronic explorations , July 2011 , pp. 363 - 385
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Allen, Cynthia. 1997. The origins of the ‘group genitive’ in English. Transactions of the Philological Society 95, 111–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Stephen R. 2005. Aspects of the theory of clitics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bermúdez-Otero, Ricardo & Payne, John. 2011. There are no special clitics. In Galani, Alexandra, Hicks, Glyn & Tsoulas, George (eds.), Morphology and its interfaces, 147–86. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Cooper, William E. & Ross, John R.. 1975. World order. In Grossman, Robin E., San, L. James & Vance, Timothy J. (eds.), Papers from the parasession on Functionalism, 63–111. Chicago: Chicago Linguistics Society.Google Scholar
Curme, George O. 1931. Syntax. Boston: Heath.Google Scholar
Denison, David, Scott, Alan & Börjars, Kersti. 2010. The real distribution of the English ‘group genitive’. Studies in Language 34, 532–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gast, V. 2006. The grammar of identity: Intensifiers and reflexives in Germanic languages. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Herriman, Jennifer. 1999. Coordinating genitives in determinative function in English. Studia Neophilologica 71, 1–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney, Payne, John & Peterson, Peter. 2002. Coordination and supplementation. In Huddleston & Pullum et al., 1273–362.Google Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney & Pullum, Geoffrey K.. 2005. A student's introduction to English grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney & Pullum, Geoffrey K. et al. 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jespersen, Otto. 1894. Progress in language: With special reference to English. London: Sonnenschein.Google Scholar
Jespersen, Otto. 1914. A modern English grammar on historical principles, part II: Syntax. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.Google Scholar
König, Ekkehard. 2001. Intensifiers and reflexives. In Haspelmath, Martin, König, Ekkehard, Oesterreicher, Wulf & Raible, Wolfgang (eds.), Language typology and language universals: An international handbook of contemporary research, 747–60. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Kruisinga, E. 1922. A handbook of Present-day English, vol. II: English accidence and syntax, 3rd edn.Groningen: Noordhoff.Google Scholar
Löbner, Sebastian. 1985. Definites. Journal of Semantics 4, 279–326.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, Philip H. & Halpern, Aaron L.. 1993. English possessives and the syntax of morphological features. In Stvan, Lauren Smith et al. . (eds.), FLSM III: Papers from the third annual meeting of the Formal Linguistics Society of Midamerica, 219–34. Bloomington IN.: Indiana University Linguistics Club.Google Scholar
Payne, John & Huddleston, Rodney. 2002. Nouns and noun phrases. In Huddleston & Pullum et al., 323–523.Google Scholar
Payne, John. 2009. The English genitive and double case. Transactions of the Philological Society 107, 322–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plank, Frans. 1992. From cases to adpositions. In Pantaleo, Nicola (ed.), Aspects of English diachronic linguistics: Papers read at the Second National Conference on the History of English, Naples, 28–29 April 1989, 19–61. Fasano: Schena.Google Scholar
Rosenbach, Anette. 2004. The English s-genitive: A case of degrammaticalization? In Fischer, Olga, Norde, Muriel & Perridon, Harry (eds.), Up and down the cline: The nature of grammaticalization, 73–96. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan. 1972. A grammar of contemporary English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Zwicky, Arnold M. 1987. Suppressing the Z's. Journal of Linguistics 23 (1), 133–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zwicky, Arnold M. 2006. Overpossessive. Language Log, 21 November.Google Scholar