ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF GENITIVES IN THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH: WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF -’S

Abstract

This paper aims to clarify the syntactic change of genitives by focusing on the development of -’s in the history of English, arguing that -’s is the descendant of the genitive inflection -(e)s. It is proposed that in the course of the development, the syntactic status of -(e)s/-’s has changed into a D element assigning genitive Case to its specifier, which is shown to be a case of degrammaticalization. It is also demonstrated that the proposed analysis can properly explain the distributional change of genitives obtained from the investigation of historical corpora.