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On the disappearance of genitive types in Middle English

Objective genitives with nouns of love and fear and the nature of syntactic change

Abstract

This paper looks at the disappearance of the ‘objective’ genitive with nouns of emotion in which the Stimulus of Emotion is a prenominal genitive, e.g. godes lufu ‘God’s love’ in the meaning of someone’s love towards God. A systematic corpus-based investigation involving three nouns of emotion indicates that this construction was obsolescent by the end of the Middle English period. I suggest that the favouring of of phrases over genitives reduced the evidence available to language learners necessary to construct grammars incorporating a marked assignment of semantic to grammatical roles.

Abstract

This paper looks at the disappearance of the ‘objective’ genitive with nouns of emotion in which the Stimulus of Emotion is a prenominal genitive, e.g. godes lufu ‘God’s love’ in the meaning of someone’s love towards God. A systematic corpus-based investigation involving three nouns of emotion indicates that this construction was obsolescent by the end of the Middle English period. I suggest that the favouring of of phrases over genitives reduced the evidence available to language learners necessary to construct grammars incorporating a marked assignment of semantic to grammatical roles.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Foreword & acknowledgements ix
  4. Introduction 1
  5. Part I. Phonology
  6. Middle English vowel length in French loanwords 9
  7. Dental fricatives and stops in Germanic 19
  8. Dialect variation and the Dutch diminutive 37
  9. Part II. Morphology, syntax and semantics
  10. On the disappearance of genitive types in Middle English 49
  11. An asymmetric view on stage II in Jespersen’s cycle in the West Germanic languages 61
  12. Temporal reference and grammaticalization in the Spanish perfect(ive) 73
  13. (Un)-interpretable features and grammaticalization 83
  14. Imperative morphology in diachrony evidence from the Romance languages 99
  15. VO vs V(…)O en Français 109
  16. On the development of Recipient passives in DO languages 123
  17. The emergence of DP in the history of English 135
  18. A diachronic view of Psychological verbs with Dative Experiencers in Spanish and Romanian 149
  19. On the loss of the masculine genitive plural in Cypriot Greek 161
  20. The rise of peripheral modifiers in the noun phrase 175
  21. Wild variation, random patterns, and uncertain data* 185
  22. Part III. Sociolinguistics and dialectology
  23. Le changement linguistique dans la langue orale selon deux recherches sur le terrain séparées d’un siècle 197
  24. Patrons sociolinguistiques chez trois générations de locuteurs acadiens 211
  25. Change of functions of the first person pronouns in Chinese 223
  26. Vinderup in real time 233
  27. Variation in real time 245
  28. Part IV. Tools and methodology
  29. UNIDIA 259
  30. Visualization, validation and seriation 269
  31. Quantifying linguistic changes 285
  32. Historical core vocabulary: Spring and/or anchor 295
  33. Index of languages and terms 307
  34. Index of subjects and terms 309
Historical Linguistics 2007
This chapter is in the book Historical Linguistics 2007
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.308.04all

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Foreword & acknowledgements ix
  4. Introduction 1
  5. Part I. Phonology
  6. Middle English vowel length in French loanwords 9
  7. Dental fricatives and stops in Germanic 19
  8. Dialect variation and the Dutch diminutive 37
  9. Part II. Morphology, syntax and semantics
  10. On the disappearance of genitive types in Middle English 49
  11. An asymmetric view on stage II in Jespersen’s cycle in the West Germanic languages 61
  12. Temporal reference and grammaticalization in the Spanish perfect(ive) 73
  13. (Un)-interpretable features and grammaticalization 83
  14. Imperative morphology in diachrony evidence from the Romance languages 99
  15. VO vs V(…)O en Français 109
  16. On the development of Recipient passives in DO languages 123
  17. The emergence of DP in the history of English 135
  18. A diachronic view of Psychological verbs with Dative Experiencers in Spanish and Romanian 149
  19. On the loss of the masculine genitive plural in Cypriot Greek 161
  20. The rise of peripheral modifiers in the noun phrase 175
  21. Wild variation, random patterns, and uncertain data* 185
  22. Part III. Sociolinguistics and dialectology
  23. Le changement linguistique dans la langue orale selon deux recherches sur le terrain séparées d’un siècle 197
  24. Patrons sociolinguistiques chez trois générations de locuteurs acadiens 211
  25. Change of functions of the first person pronouns in Chinese 223
  26. Vinderup in real time 233
  27. Variation in real time 245
  28. Part IV. Tools and methodology
  29. UNIDIA 259
  30. Visualization, validation and seriation 269
  31. Quantifying linguistic changes 285
  32. Historical core vocabulary: Spring and/or anchor 295
  33. Index of languages and terms 307
  34. Index of subjects and terms 309
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