Planned intervention: On Wednesday June 26th 05:30 UTC Zenodo will be unavailable for 10-20 minutes to perform a storage cluster upgrade.
Published April 12, 2021 | Version v1
Book chapter Open

Case and agreement in possessive noun phrases in mainly English, Swedish, and Finnish

  • 1. University of Newcastle

Description

The paper is based on a set of observations about the prenominal possessive
construction in English, Swedish, Finnish, and Hungarian. These include the fact that
coordination of possessive pronouns is degraded in English (??your and my home),
but not in the other languages and that the adnominal pronoun construction (APC)
we children cannot have a genitive pronoun in English or Swedish (*our children
home) but can do in Finnish. On the other hand Finnish and Hungarian do not
show possessive agreement when the possessor is an APC. These observations
can be explained if the possessive construction has the structure [Poss [NP DP N]],
where Poss hosts a set of unvalued φ-features valued by the possessor DP. In En-
glish and Swedish, Poss is spelled out as a genitive pronoun (my, her, our, etc.). In
Finnish and Hungarian it is spelled out as a possessive agreement suffix. In all the
languages this is the case only when the possessor DP is a bare pronoun: Poss does
not agree with a lexical DP. This is couched in a version of the theory of agreement
and incorporation in Roberts (2010a,b).

 

Files

277-BárányEtAl-2021-7.pdf

Files (196.5 kB)

Name Size Download all
md5:ef86bfbbd1d9035b1d9af62dbd73324b
196.5 kB Preview Download

Additional details

Related works

Is part of
978-3-96110-308-9 (ISBN)
10.5281/zenodo.4680264 (DOI)