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 |
References in this publication: 0
The citations/references list is based on indexed publications only, and may therefore be incomplete.
For any and all inquiries related to the database, please contact us at [Please enable javascript to view.].