Sunday, May 17, 2020

Detail #395: A Way of Forming Genitive Constructions

So, I came across a quote from some text today that stated that "the genitive case seems to have survived linguistic evolution moreso than other cases in Europe because of the desire to communicate association and possession between nouns". I already have discarded the tab where it was quoted ages ago, so I am not sure about the exact wording and looking for it would be tedious and it was in Swedish so it's not like it'd be of much use to anyone, and it was old - it was in 18th century Swedish. Whatever may be the case, it made me think a bit about genitive-like constructions, and I came up with one I have not seen elsewhere.

So, in English and Swedish, the genitive marker occupies the same syntactic slot as articles. You can't say "Enid's the car" and by that mean 'the car of Enid's', as contrasted to 'Enid's a car' for 'a car of Enid's'.

Now, in some languages - Finnish among them - genitives behave more like adjectives. You can, in fact, place some attributes of a noun on the other side of the genitive in Finnish. Thus, the genitive in Finnish is "more clearly" inside the NP than they are in Swedish and English (where they arguably rather are parts of a DP that surround the NP).

Now, what if genitives were not marked, but were located inside the NP, and the language had explicit articles. Let's imagine the articles have a similar allomorphy as they do in English:
an a man cave: a cave of a man
the a man cave: the cave of a man
the the man cave: the cave of the man
a the man cave: a cave of the man
In a language with gender markers on the articles, this might be more likely to occur, as the relationships between the nouns and the articles would be easier to unpack.