LL-L: "Grammar" (was "Morphology") LOWLANDS-L, 13.JAN.2001 (02) [E]

Sat Jan 13 23:40:47 UTC 2001

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From: "Ian James Parsley" [parsleyij at yahoo.com]
Subject: LL-L: "Morphology" LOWLANDS-L, 12.JAN.2001 (10) [E]

Folk,

I too have heard that the genitive/possive in 'apostrophe-s' was so
formed because it was understood something was 'missing' - thus:

John his car - John's car

However, I am also led to believe that the general consensus his that
the construction 'John his car' is actually not original.

I was on the phone the other day to a friend from Co Tyrone in the
west of Ulster. She, on regular occasions, starts sentences with the
subject and then repeats the pronoun, which is common across Ulster,
e.g.:

'My brother Cathal, he came home from Coleraine yesterday'
'My mum, she would do a buffet at Christmas'

However, this often converts into the possessive, e.g.:
'My brother, his car broke down at the New Year'

Now, the commas I've inserted there are in fact 'grammatical', they
are not reflective of any break in speech. However, my point is that
it is questionable whether the construction is actually 'my brother
his car' - I suspect it is 'my brother, (well) his car'. In Belfast
(and some urban areas in Scotland, I believe), the tendency is to say
'See my brother? His car...'

My suspicion is that the older genitive is formed in -s (as it is in
some noun groups of other older Indo-European tongues), and that the
apostrophe insertion was either incorrectly based on 'John his car',
or reflective of a vowel (usually <i> or <e>) which appeared in
earlier texts but which subsequently disappeared.

Regards,
Ian James Parsley

----------

From: Barbara Rentsch-Buschkoetter [rentschbuschkoetter at web.de]
Subject: Morphology

Dear Lowlanders,
Ron is absolutely right when he says: "The less morphological markings,
the more syntactic markings".
The best example for this is the English syntax rule "subject -
predicate - object"
In High German the morphological endings identify nouns, articles,
adjectives and pronouns in their syntactic functions and semantic
relations, and the endings of the verb tell you noun or pro-noun is the
subject. So you have a choice of how to arrange the parts of a sentence
in case of emphasy:
Ich sah den Mann vorige Woche zweimal in der Bank, aber...
Den Mann sah ich vorige Woche zweimal in der Bank, aber...
Den Mann sah ich zweimal vorige Woche in der Bank, aber...
Zweimal sah ich den Mann vorige Woche in der Bank, aber...
Vorige Woche sah ich den Mann zweimal in der Bank, aber...
In der Bank sah ich den Mann vorige Woche zweimal, aber...
Gesehen hab' ich den Mann vorige Woche zweimal in der Bank, aber...
(this version is only possible in the present perfect)

Now put these versions into English:
I saw the man in the bank twice last week, but...
That man did I see in the bank twice last week, but...
That man did I see twice in the bank last week, but...
Twice did I see that man in the bank last week, but...
Last week I saw the man twice in the bank, but...
In the bank I saw the man twice last week, but...
???

Being very economical throughout the centuries the English people
thought it unnecessary to bother their minds with putting endings to the
verb once they had said, who or what was the subject of the action. But
leaving the endings out made them stick to a strict syntactic rule:
subject - verbs - rest of the sentence. So whenever they wanted to put a
non-subject part of the sentence at the beginning they had to mark it
without changing the word order subject - verb. That was the moment when
the auxiliary verb got the most important role in English grammar.
Regarding this you can explain the construction of questions and
negations without exeptions:
You form a question by putting the first auxiliary verb in front of the
subject so that the main verb stays behind it. If there is no auxiliary
in the sentence you take the dummy "do".
You negate a sentence by putting "not" behind the first auxiliary. If
there isn't any, take again the dummy "do".
When the copula "be" isn't linked to a verb form, the predicate
compliment (noun or adjective) takes over the function of a verb.
Thus you needn't explain why you don't use the dummy "do" in subject
questions with "who" and "what".
Ok, in affirmative sentences you mayput expressions of place and time
and some adverbs in front without inversion of the auxiliary, but as
soon they are asked for by question words they stick to the rule.
Have I overseen anything?

Barbara

----------

From: Margaret Tarbet [oneko at mindspring.com]
Subject: Morphology

On Fri, 12 Jan 2001 15:27:13 -0800, Ron wrote:

>In languages that have consistent morphological marking, such as Latin
and,
>outside Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic, syntactic marking tends to be
less
>rigid because the cases are clearly marked and no confusion can arise.
>Syntactic flexibility is utilized especially in poetic styles (which also
>applies to German to some extent).
>
>I think there is a general rule here:
>"The less morphological marking the more syntactic marking"
>
>In other words, syntactic case marking takes over where morphological case

>marking disappears.  This is why English syntax is less flexible that
German,
>Latin or Russian syntax.
>
>Any comments?

Certainly that's what I was taught when learning Russian.  Profs.
Krasnopolski and Cherniak were quite adamant that one can map all
Russian (in that instance) cases onto any other IE language, the
only difference being how the case is encoded.  In their view,
English encodes using word order and prepositions, but has exactly
the same cases.  If I recall correctly, they said that the only
ur-IE case that seems to be going away is vocative.

I learnt English grammar along with the Russian. :-)

Margaret

----------

From: Stefan Israel [stefansfeder at yahoo.com]
Subject: LL-L: "Morphology" LOWLANDS-L, 12.JAN.2001 (09) [E]

In response to Barbara Rentsch-Buschkoetter's
 > Is it possible that the old "Saxon genitive"
 > is a short form of "his"?

Sandy Fleming wrote:

> This construction does indeed occur quite commonly
>  in written records in Middle Scot  [...] John Burne his
housss

I recall seeing that seeing that in England years ago (from the
1600's?  I can't find the relevant book):  since large regions
dropped [h], <Johnis> and <John his> would sound identical,
leading speakers to re-interpret the possessive -s as the
possessive pronoun _his_.  What I can't recall is how this was
applied to women's names:  _Jane's/Janis/Jane his_ or _Jane
her_.

Barbara wrote also:

>You surely refer to the "genetive s".That
> may be interpreted as a relict from Latin assimilations, where
> the genitive endings are mostly with *s in the singular
> forms of masculine and neutral nouns,

English has used the inherited possessive -s uninterrupted from
Old to Middle to Modern English, eventually extending it to all
nouns, regardless of gender or noun class.  There was no need to
borrow an ending already present in the language.  In Latin, -i
is actually the most common genitive ending, followed by -is for
all three genders.  English didn't borrow Latin case endings,
since English was (still slowly is) removing its case endings
(Yes, English -did- borrow plural markers: alumnI, criteriA
etc., but then, English still uses plural endings).

>why is the "s" in the "Saxon genitive"
> seperated by an apostroph?

The apostrophe was used to indicate a contraction: do not >
don't,  factory > fact'ry, and that could  include where a schwa
was dropped: a word like _seemed_ (2 syllables) was often
written <seem'd>, and when <-es/-is> contracted, it was
generally written <'s>.  The apostrophe helped indicate that the
<s> was an ending and not part of the word:  ray's vs. race,
flea's and fleece: given how variable English spelling was, the
apostrophe became a convenient way of clearly distinguishing
between the possessive and words actually ending in _s_ (both
[s] or [z]).

For the same reason, a silent <e> was often added to a word
ending in _s_ to make it clear that the <s> was not a possessive
e.g. _house, fleece_.

> 3.    "mine, his, hers, ours, yours and theirs" are no cases,
> but forms of the possessive pronouns.

Yes.  In Old English they occurred in every case–   they still
do, in a trivial sense, except that English only has the 3 cases
(who whose whom) and no case endings of a few actual pronouns.

> With adjectives that in this case have the function of an
> attribute you substitute the noun by the dummy-word "one /
> ones". The possessive pronouns have also attributive function
> and are also combined with "one"
> in the 1st person sg. and with "ones" in the other persons:
> my + one = mine
> his + ones = his
> her + ones = hers
> our + one = ours
> your + ones = yours
> their + ones = theirs

Actually, if you trace English all the way back to its earliest
records,  the -n in mine/thine was always part of the possessive
adjective, just like in the other Germanic languages:

German    mein/dein  [main dain] vs. ein [ain] "one"
Old Engl  mi'n/thi'n [mi:n Di:n]     a'n  [a:n]
Swedish   min/din    [mi:n di:n]     en   [e:n]
Icelandic mi'n/thi'n [mi:n Di:n]    ein   [Ejn]
Gothic    mein/thein  [mi:n Ti:n]    ain  [ain] or [E:n]
  etc.

(as usual, [T D] represent the sounds in English _thin_ and
_the_.  The apostrophe in these words represents the accent mark
used to indicate a long vowel)

The resemblance between _mine_ and _one_ fades the closer you
look into the history of the words.  The -in [i:n] appears to be
the same adjectival formant found in other Indo-European
language e.g. serpentine.
On a tangent: when I hear _yuns_ [j at nz] for  you plural in
Apallachia, that does seem to come from "you ones".  Apallachian
speakers, does that seem to fit?

> So I think, personal pronouns have 2 cases in English and Low
> German:  subject case and object case.

The form _whose_ is still in possessive case, and is a pronoun,
both interrogative and relative.

And Ron added:

> We keep saying that in English, Low Saxon (Low German) and
> other Lowlands languages there is only an objective case, as
> opposed to specific dative and accusative cases, as in German,
> Slavic, Latin, etc.  I am not all that sure that it is
> accurate to say that there is "no dative" and "no
> accusative."
>
> It is certainly true to say that there is only one objective
> case as far as *morphology* is concerned.  However, I would
> like to propose that there *is* a dative case and there *is*
> an accusative case in the Lowlands languages.  It is only that

> these are not *morphologically marked*.  In other
> words, there  are no specific dative and accusative forms of
> nouns,pronouns, articles and adjectives.

You took the words out of my mouth.  The endings are gone
(except in a few pronouns, or adjective endings in some Lowland
varieties), but there is still a contrast in function, whether
that contrast is marked by word order or by a preposition.

I think it will clarify matters to get away from the term case,
which we associate with case ending:  All the Lowland languages
clearly do distinguish between direct and indirect objects, but
not with endings.  They don't have an accusative/dative contrast
with prepositions etc.; compare German _in ihm/in ihn (hinein)_
"within him/into him".  Thus, it might be clearer to talk about
the grammatical categories (direct and indirect object, e.g.),
rather than cases, which are used in multiple functions (object
of verbs, of prepositions, of adjectives ("mir treu", er ist es
wert, sie war dessen bewusst.), etc.  Those additional uses of
cases for multiple grammatical functions vary between languages
as well.

> I think there is a general rule here:
> "The less morphological marking the more syntactic marking"

Or more particles/prepositions etc.:  we might refine the rule
to: the less you use of one strategy, the more you have to use
of other strategies.

Stefan Israel
stefansfeder at yahoo.com

----------

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

I wrote in reply to Barbara:
>3. We still have a genitive in English as well as the forms listed. Beyond

that, however, is there not a confusion between "cases" and "forms"? The
first pers. sing. pronoun has the forms "I", "me", "mine" but the second
does duty for the object case, the indirect object case and the
prepositional case which certainly correspond to different grammatical
concepts.<

Barbara replied:
>1.    There is no hint of having datives and accusatives in English. <

Well, I carefully avoided saying that such cases exist.

>2.    You are talking about the genitive in English and ask, if I'm
confusing "Case" with "form". <

"Beyond this" was meant to imply a second, separate thought.

>You surely refer to the "genetive s".That may be interpreted as a relict
from Latin assimilations, ...<

I was in fact referring to the pronouns. As far as I know the genitive "s"
in Old English is not borrowed. It is also a common ending for masculine
and
neuter gen. sing. nouns in Old Norse and even more common in Gothic.

> but why is the "s" in the "Saxon genitive" seperated by an apostroph? ...

Is it possible that the old "Saxon genitive" is a short form of "his"?<

In English the apostrophe came about because some grammarians in the
16th/17th centuries assumed that the genitive "s" was a relic of "his", so
that "Bob Green his hat" had reduced to "Bob Greens hat", and inserted the
apostrophe to indicate the supposedly missing letters.  It is, of course,
useful in distinguishing possessives from plurals and for indicating
pronunciation differences in cases such as "St James's Park" and "St James'

Infirmary". Chambers "Dictionary of Etymology" incorrectly says that the
possessive form of "Jones" is "Jones'", but since the pronunciation is more

likely to be "Jones's" the spelling should correspond. (I have previously
mentioned the "greengrocer's apostrophe" - writing "potato's" as the plural

of "potato".) BTW, "its" is an 18th ? century invention designed to replace

"his" (possessive adjective and pronoun) for inanimate objects. Often
written as "it's" by the uneducated and people writing e-mails at 3 am.

>In the working dialect of the industrial area of the Ruhrgebiet (Dortmund,

Bochum, etc.) people don't use a genitive, they day "mein Bruder sein
Fahrrad" = "my brother his bike". <

Also in Dutch: "mijn broer z'n fiets".

There is, of course, in BE a general distinction between the uses of "the
X's Y" and "the Y of X". Thus, usually, "the girl's dress" and "the door of

the house", ie the first form for animate things and the latter for
inanimate. Of course, the distinction is not always maintained where
emphasis is important or in formal expressions or in set phrases- cf "a
dog's hair" and "a hair of the dog".

>3.    "mine, his, hers, ours, yours and theirs" are no cases, but forms
of the possessive pronouns. <

Yes, they are the genitive or possessive forms of the pronouns! Why make
things more complicated by arguing that they are really something else?
The real question in all this is "What is the most useful and natural way
of
codifying grammar?" "Mine", for example, stands for a noun phrase and
therefore, by the definition of "pronoun", is a pronoun.

John Feather johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk

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