Nominative-Genitive Conversion (NGC) in Japanese, which is also called Ga/No Conversion, is one of the most well-studied phenomena in Japanese syntax (see Harada 1971, 1976, Bedell 1972, Shibatani 1975, Nakai 1980, Saito 1983, 2004, Miyagawa 1993, to appear, Watanabe 1996, Hiraiwa 2001, 2005, and Ochi 2001, to appear, among many others). NGC is a Case alternation phenomenon in which the nominat...

This study examined the acquisition of prenominal and postnominal genitives by Iranian EFL learners. Two variables were considered: possessive categories and language proficiency. We considered the influence of possessive categories such as lexical modifier, semantic relationship, and weight and syntactic complexity on genitive alternations by Iranian EFL learners. Also, we examined whether the...

Superlative expressions (such as “the tallest boy”) single out entities by comparing them to others with respect to a set of properties. Therefore, a proper semantics for a superlative expression requires a correct computation of the comparison set. In most of the cases, this can be done in a compositional fashion (leaving contextual influences aside). When superlative adjectives occur in preno...

Languages differ regarding the depth, structure, and syntactic domains of recursive structures. Even within a single language, some structures allow infinite self-embedding while others are more restricted. For example, when expressing ownership relation, English allows embedding prenominal genitive -s, whereas postnominal is much How do speakers learn which specific not? The distributional lea...

The argument-modifier distinction is less clear i n NPs than in VPs since nouns do not typically take arguments. The clearest cases of arguments in NPs are found in certain kinds of nominalizations which retain some “verbal” properties (Grimshaw 1990). The status of apparent arguments of non-deverbal relational nouns like sister is more controversial. Genitive constructions like John’s teacher,...

In Norwegian, possessive pronouns can be prenominal (min bil 'my car') or postnominal (bilen min 'car.DEF my'). In the Principles and Parameters literature, the standard assumption is that possessive pronouns are prenominal in underlying structure, while the postnominal position is a result of N-movement. This paper takes a different approach. The focus is the grammatical differences between th...

This paper discusses genitive phrases in Hindi/Urdu in general and puts a particular focus on genitive scrambling, a process whereby the basic order of constituents is changed. In Hindi/Urdu, genitive phrases may not only occur at different structural positions within the NP that they modify; under the right circumstances, they can also be found outside of the NP, yielding discontinuous structu...

In this paper, I discuss the semantics of certain instances of non-canonical genitive Case in Russian. I use the term non-canonical genitive Case to refer to the phenomena whereby an object of the verb is assigned genitive Case, rather than accusative. More specifically, I discuss two phenomena: Genitive of Negation and Intensional Genitive. The paper is organized as follows. First, I introduce...

This article explores the variation between the emergent genitive its and the periphrastic form of it in Early Modern English, situating this case in the larger picture of English genitive variation. As previous studies have often focused on non-pronominal possessors (given that Present Day English pronominal possessors often appear prenominally, with limited variation), this early pronominal g...

The present study uses event-related potentials to investigate how crosslinguistic (dis)similarities modulate anticipatory processing in the second language (L2). Participants read predictive stories English that made a genitive construction consisting of third-person singular possessive pronoun and kinship noun (e.g., his mother) likely an upcoming continuation. pronoun's form depended on ante...