LL-L: "Grammar" LOWLANDS-L, 19.JAN.2001 (01) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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From: john feather [johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk]
Subject: Grammar

I'm not sure that I really understood Barbara's comments on syntax vs.
morphology but they stimulated the following thoughts.

1. Case markers in German do not significantly affect the flexibility of
word order: there aren't enough of them. For every singular der/den you have
a die/die and a das/das.

2. Most morphology in German (and probably in most other languages as well)
has no semantic content and is therefore (following the DNA terminology)
"junk". For example, in German the combination def art + adj + plural noun
requires the adj to have the ending -en. But since it is the same for all
cases and genders it might as well be omitted. Different prepositions take
different cases (so syntax+morphology) but when a particular preposition
always takes the same case the morphology conveys nothing additional.

3. I have just been studying time expressions in Classical Greek, which used
case without a preposition for different time concepts - time during which,
time at which, time for which. An obvious triumph of morphology over syntax,
but it occurs to me that in English, although we can use prepositions (and
other words) in time expressions we can also use simple phrases like "next
week" which can mean more than one thing and still convey our meaning. So
did the Greeks really need their cases?

4. Since in Swedish and Norwegian the finite verb has no marker for person
or number I am very reluctant to attribute the oddities of the English verb
to a degree of simplification which is less extreme than that.

John Feather johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk

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From: john feather [johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk]
Subject: Grammar

The English genitive " 's" is dealt with in David Crystal's "The Cambridge
Encyclopedia of the English Language", though not very deeply. He seems to
say that the early (OE/ME) masculine genitive ending "-es" came to be
interpreted as a form of "his". (The pronunciation could well have been
similar if the "h" was not pronounced, just as nowadays in BE we tend to
drop the "h" in "his" and "him" after a consonant, so the written form "Bob
Green his hat" could have been pronounced as "Bob Greenis hat".) Later on
the apostrophe came into use to indicate the omission of the "e" of the
genitive ending, and this in turn gave rise to the idea that what was
missing was in fact the first letters of "his". Crystal says this idea is
still around. This version of the tale is slightly different from the one I
suggested earlier, because I believed that the "his" form followed the
introduction of " 's". It may of course be that this path was taken by
people attempting a deliberately archaic style, or that the changes occurred
differently in different places.

Crystal also says that it was argued as late as the beginning of the 19th
century that the genitive plural "girls' " was incorrect because the
apostrophe did not indicate an omission.

But I have kept the best till last. (N Americans write " 'til" on the
assumption that the word is short for "until", as they write " 'round"
instead of "round", assuming an abbreviation of "around", a curious form of
pedantry by people who write "lite".) N F Blake in "A History of the English
Language" says in the chapter dealing with the period 1400-1660 that the
genitive with "his" arose directly from the genitive in "-s" and also says
that forms such as "Venus her shell" occurred.

I had not realised before that forms such as "Lady chapel" involved a
genitive.

John Feather johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk

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