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English possessive ’s: clitic and affix

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Abstract

The English possessive marker displays properties of both clitic and affix. I argue that synchronically it is, in fact, both, rather than only one or the other or something halfway between. I show that it is possible to model the dual clitic/affix status of the possessive in the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar, and that this model is capable of accounting for the full range of constructions in which the possessive marker appears. This also has consequences for questions of English noun phrase syntax, and issues of categoriality and degrammaticalization.

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Notes

  1. Besides the literature cited in this paper, see also the works referenced in Allen (2008), Anderson (2008), Payne (2009).

  2. The distinction is discussed in detail by Anderson et al. (2006).

  3. Phrasal affixes were in fact proposed by Luís and Sadler (2003) to account for European Portuguese clitics in an LFG framework, but their model was quickly modified, and the phrasal affix element dropped (Luís and Otoguro 2004, 2005).

  4. On what is actually found in spoken PDE, see Scott et al. (2007) and Denison et al. (2010). The latter find only five examples of the phrasal possessive in the British National Corpus (BNC), i.e. 0.04 % of all possessive constructions; they argue this gap cannot be ascribed to a general lack of postmodification with nouns. They argue that its infrequency is due to the use of avoidance strategies: the of-construction, and the previously unidentified ‘split genitive’, discussed below (Sect. 6.2).

  5. I return to this issue in a slightly different context in Sect. 3.1.1 below.

  6. As pointed out to me by the editor, in at least some North American dialects (5a) is in fact more acceptable than (4a), whereas (5b) is consistently bad.

  7. For example, Börjars et al. (2013) argue that the clitic-affix distinction is multi-dimensional and that the mental grammar has access to probabilities, statistical preferences, in relation to different phrases occurring in different environments, so that graded/statistical grammaticality judgements result from interaction between competing constraints, in a stochastic model. They attempt no formal modeling, but it is clear that possessive ’s still occupies a single position within this framework of probabilities and constraints.

  8. Besides the work of Wescoat, Lexical Sharing is also utilized in LFG by Broadwell (2007, 2008) and Alsina (2010). Broadwell (2008) also notes that the approach of Bresnan and Mugane (2006) to mixed categories is in some ways similar to LS, permitting a single word to instantiate two nodes, but only in the case of morphologically ‘mixed’ forms.

  9. LS therefore represents an instantiation in LFG terms of ‘multidominance’ in syntactic representation, i.e. the idea that one word or node may be dominated by more than one mother node. Multidominance is found also in other syntactic theories, such as Minimalism (cf. Citko and Gračanin-Yuksek 2013:5ff., with references). In LFG it is absolutely restricted to adjacent mother nodes; this is not necessarily the case in other theories, but it is, for example, in the Representation Theory of Williams (2003) and the ‘Spanning’ theory within Nanosyntax (Ramchand 2008; Svenonius 2011).

  10. The evidence provided by Wescoat (2005), which I am able only to summarize here, is unambiguous within the lexicalist and modular architectural assumptions of LFG, but it may be noted that in other frameworks it could be possible to derive some of these features without assuming an affix.

  11. LS is relevant only to the analysis of portmanteau words that pattern with two-word sequences. Given LFG’s lexicalism, where portmanteau words pattern with single words of greater morphological complexity, as with English went beside regular past tense forms like walk-ed, no special analysis is required since both the morphologically complex and the portmanteau words are treated as single lexical items.

  12. As pointed out by a reviewer, this ‘constrained’ approach to LS renders impossible Wescoat’s (2009) analysis of Udi ‘endoclitic’ person markers, since no allomorphy whatsoever is involved.

  13. The confusion between the two arises partly because of this diachronic origin of (at least some) LS phenomena, and also partly because in both cases one is dealing with single phonological words, so again the correct analysis is not always immediately obvious.

  14. For recent discussion of the s-string, its representation and place in the grammar, see Dalrymple and Mycock (2011) and Mycock and Lowe (2013).

  15. The one possible question mark over this reformulation is that \(\pi\) becomes a relation, not a function, which threatens the overall concept of a function from form to meaning (cf. Asudeh 2006). This potential problem can be avoided, however, as long as each annotation on a ‘shared’ lexical entry is explicitly assigned to only one of the c-structure exponents. In this way the ‘path’ through the relation \(\pi\) is specified, such that it still effectively works as a function.

  16. For an overview of the DP hypothesis, see Zlatic (1997:Chap. 1) and Bernstein (2001).

  17. Cf. also Zribi-Hertz (1997).

  18. This difference from the movement-based tradition partly stems from the fact that in LFG features like agreement and discourse function are captured not in the constituent structure but at other levels of the grammar. More widely on the formalization of noun phrases in LFG, see Laczkó (1995).

  19. I restrict discussion purely to contexts involving the possessive marker; more widely on the arguments for and against the DP in PDE, see Payne (1993).

  20. There are semantic restrictions on this construction, the details of which are not universally agreed upon and which are not relevant to the syntactic analysis; cf. Payne (2013:179) with references.

  21. In more complex analyses of noun phrase syntax only the definite determiner is assumed to appear in D, but in the original form of the DP hypothesis, where there is only one functional head in the noun phrase, all determiners must be assumed to appear there.

  22. Barker (1998) among others argues that this is the correct analysis of the construction, on the grounds that the prepositional phrase here is partitive, not possessive. Such an analysis would be entirely consistent with the model proposed here, though it is not necessary, as shown below.

  23. And is, of course, implied by affixal analyses of the possessive such as those of Zwicky (1987), Lapointe (1990), Miller (1991) and Payne (2009). The most recent clitic-based analysis that reflects this intuition is that of Peters and Westerståhl (2013).

  24. The DP hypothesis has more widely been subject to theoretical criticism, for example by Payne (1993), Meyers (1995), Bruening (2009), and cf. further Spencer (1992), Hudson (1987), Payne and Huddleston (2002).

  25. Furthermore, they do not exclude the possibility that the nominal syntax of English is more complicated, perhaps involving functional projections (other than DP) above NP, when it comes to dealing with, for example, quantified noun phrases, which I make no attempt to deal with here.

  26. For non-projecting categories, cf. Toivonen (2003); the circumflex representation for non-projecting categories comes originally from Asudeh (2002).

  27. I assume the functional attribute poss for possessors, but nothing would in principle prevent an alternative functional analysis, for example subj, as proposed by Chisarik and Payne (2001).

  28. For the sake of avoiding a lengthy digression I pass over the details of the semantic structure here, but it is worth noting that I assume throughout that c-structure possessors and ‘of’ phrases always appear in the f-structure as poss and adj respectively, and that more specific thematic relations are dealt with in the semantic structure. That is, for example, in the NP Napoleon’s destruction of the city, Napoleon is functionally a possessor and only semantically a subject (i.e. an agent), and likewise the city is functionally the obj within an adjunct headed by of, and only semantically the object (i.e. the patient) of the event noun.

  29. It would be possible to assume an f-structure attribute such as possform, in order to ensure that the ’s were a functional co-head, parallel to compform with CPs, but I do not consider this necessary.

  30. A technical consequence of Kaplan’s s-string is that the arrow ↑ commonly used in lexical entries must be interpreted somewhat differently from when it appears as an annotation on c-structure nodes. Specifically, ↑ in a lexical entry is not \(\hat{\ast}_{\phi}\) but \(\bullet_{\pi\phi}\), where • refers to the current s-string element (cf. Mycock and Lowe 2013:453–454). Really, then, ↑ (and ↓) should be avoided in lexical entries, and alternative abbreviations used, but for the sake of simplicity I retain the traditional notation.

  31. The specification in the lexical entry here is essentially equivalent to Wescoat’s lexical instantiation rules.

  32. The lexical entry specifies the c-structure categories with which the word is associated, and the relative order in which they must appear. The hierarchical relations between the two nodes are not specified, but will be determined by the phrase structure rules of the language (including the rules given above, 16–20).

  33. For my own treatment of this phenomenon, see below.

  34. In the approach presented in this paper, we must account for examples like (36) by assuming that 3sg. present tense verb forms parallel regular plural nouns and words like species in having an affixal (lexically shared) possessive form. Admittedly, this requires a certain amount of lexical duplication, but not as much as analyses in which every verb form (and preposition, etc.) must have a lexically specified possessive form.

  35. Cf. the similar criticism of Anderson’s proposals by Payne (2009:328).

  36. Or we may not: Plank (1985) considers the zero genitive with regular plurals to be the regular outcome of the inherited genitive plural marker -a; this zero marker became an allomorph of ’s when the latter was extended to irregular plurals (having been originally exclusively singular).

  37. Given that the head N of an NP cannot regularly be omitted in English.

  38. Plank (1992) notes that things are more complex than simply an either/or determiner/modifier analysis; cf. also Haspelmath (1999).

  39. On the alternation in the form of possessive pronouns see also Barker (1998) and Bernstein and Tortora (2005).

  40. In phrases such as my old one(s), the pronoun one will contribute a pred pro feature to the possessed f-structure (i.e. the f-structure of one). *Mine old one(s) is then impossible because pred values are uniquely instantiated; so although both mine and one specify the same value (i.e. pro) for the possessed f-structure’s pred, a pred clash results, since it is only permitted for a pred value to be specified once.

  41. Anderson (2013) discusses coordinated possessive phrases like Rachel’s and Alice’s husbands, arguing that these are problematic for an analysis in which possessive ’s has its own node in the syntactic structure. However, even under the traditional DP hypothesis that Anderson assumes, a coordinated structure similar (mutatis mutandis) to that in (49) could account for such phrases, and under the analysis of noun phrase syntax assumed here can be analysed without difficulty by assuming coordination of possessive DPs in Spec, NP.

  42. I know of no examples in which both reanalyses occur, e.g. “the man’s with the ducks’s car.” This may simply be due to the rarity of the double marking construction; there is nothing in the analysis proposed here that would exclude its existence.

  43. Interestingly, Allen (2013) shows that ordinary genitive case constructions in Old English cannot underlie the split possessive in Middle English and, by implication, PDE, which indirectly supports an analysis whereby the Middle English/PDE split possessive is not a pure affixal construction.

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Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Mary Dalrymple, Louise Mycock, Liselotte Snijders, two anonymous reviewers and the editor-in-chief Marcel den Dikken for comments on earlier versions. I would like to thank the audiences at LSA 2013, SE-LFG 10, the University of Oxford General Linguistics Seminar, and the 21st International Conference on Historical Linguistics, where earlier versions of this work were presented, for their attention and helpful comments. All errors are my own. This work was undertaken while in receipt of an Early Career Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust.

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    John J. Lowe

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Lowe, J.J. English possessive ’s: clitic and affix. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 34, 157–195 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-015-9300-1

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