Why all John’s friends are Dutch, not German; on differences in West Germanic in the interaction between universal quantifiers and genitives

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... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Robert Cirillo
Dokumenttyp: Artikel
Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
Reihe/Periodikum: Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol XVI, Iss 2, Pp 47-68 (2014)
Verlag/Hrsg.: Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti
Schlagwörter: universal quantifier / genitive / possessive adjective / definiteness / Germanic / Philology. Linguistics / P1-1091
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-26628858
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
Powered By: BASE
Link(s) : https://doaj.org/article/9c21747a8fc343d39547c7c5284f5546

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.