Germanic possessive -s : an empirical, historical and theoretical study
Research Questions
Data from the development of the proto-Germanic genitive -s to its different forms in present-day varieties have been adduced in two current debates in linguistics:
(i) historically on issues relating to the concept of degrammaticalisation, and
(ii) in relation to morpho-syntactic theory on the reassessment of categories like clitic. In spite of the vast literature on these issues, no one has taken a family-wide overview. This project will do that.
Aims and objectives
HISTORICAL: to provide a comparative study of the historical development of the possessive -s in three Germanic languages: Dutch, English and Swedish;
EMPIRICAL: to describe in detail the structural and distributional properties of the possessive -s in the modern varieties of English and Swedish and to make the results available through a database;
THEORETICAL: to gain insight into the properties of morphological categories such as 'affix' and 'clitic', the relation between them and how they change over time.