| Title: | Why all John’s friends are Dutch, not German: On differences in West Germanic in the interaction between universal quantifiers and genitives |
| Author: | Robert Cirillo |
| Publication: | Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics, XVI (2) |
| p-ISSN: | 2069-9239 |
| Publisher: | Universitatea din București |
| Place: | București |
| Year: | 2014 |
| Abstract: | Unlike English and Dutch, German does not allow a genitive to follow a universal quantifier: (i) All John’s friends... (ii) Al Jans vrienden... (Dutch) (iii) *All(e) Johanns Freunde... (German) In this article I show that this discrepancy results from two facts. Firstly, the German Saxon Genitive is a true case ending assigned in [Spec, NP] or [Spec, PossP] while in Dutch and English genitive case cannot be assigned at the N or n level (without a preposition) and the Saxon Genitive is more like a possessive adjective, initiating as the head of PossP and terminating in D. Secondly, in Germanic, D or [Spec, DP] must be overtly occupied in case of definiteness, and if the D node is already overtly occupied, and if genitive case has already been assigned, there is no motivation for moving a genitive phrase to the D level. I also show that Germanic dative of possession constructions (possessor doubling) can be explained within the same framework. Finally, there is a brief discussion of the potential applicability of this analysis to Scandinavian. |
| Key words: | universal quantifier, genitive, possessive adjective, definiteness, Germanic |
| Language: | English |
| Links: |  pdf  html |
Citations to this publication: 1
| 1 | Florin Sterian | Bibliografia românească de lingvistică (BRL, 57, 2014). Lucrări de lingvistică apărute în țara noastră în cursul anului 2014 | LR, LXIV (2), 183 | 2015 |
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