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...

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...

The Proto-Semitic genitive ending on triptotic nouns is commonly reconstructed as *-im (unbound state)/*-i (bound state). In Akkadian, however, this case long -ī- before pronominal suffixes. Since the length of vowel unexplained, I argue that it original and Akkadian bound state -i should also be *-ī, explaining its retention in word-final position. This form seems more than Proto-West-Semitic ...

Accounts of clause-level phenomena such as inversion and obviation (Aissen 1997, 1999) make crucial reference to the relative ranking of two arguments, subject and direct object, on a person/animacy/discourse hierarchy. Are such pair-wise comparisons ever required within the NP? O’Connor (1999a,b) proposed an analysis of NP-internal case-marking of possessors in Northern Pomo that paralleled Ai...

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS CHAPTER I: SYNTAX AS A PROJECTION OF THE LEXICON 1. The core-semantic relations and their syntactic realization 2. Adjunct-semantic relations and their syntactic realization Footnotes to Chapter I CHAPTER II: EXTERNAL-ARGUMENTS: ARGUMENTAND ADJUNCT-SUBJECTS 1. Control and Raising Verbs: Some differences 1. The distribution of expletives and idioms 2. The distribution of the pro...

We describe a process for converting the Penn Arabic Treebank into the CCG formalism. Previous efforts have yielded CCGbanks in English, German, and Turkish, thus opening these languages to the sophisticated computational tools developed for CCG and enabling further cross-linguistic development. Conversion from a context free grammar treebank to a CCGbank is a four stage process: head finding, ...

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...

The German noun phrase generally reflects a straightforward four-way case distinction (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative), but this is most clearly realized on the determiner. Nouns show a depleted case system: genitive is only marked specifically on masculine/neuter nouns in the singular. There are several contexts which require genitive case: possessor NPs and objects of certain verbs ...

In this paper, we show how frames can be employed in the analysis 5 of genitive constructions. We model the main approaches in the discussion about 6 genitive constructions, i.e. the argument-only approach, the modifier-only approach 7 and the split approach. Of these three, the split approach is modeled most naturally 8 in frames. Thus, if frames are considered a cognitively adequate represent...