A Synchronic and Diachronic Study on the Syntactic Structure, Semantics and Pragmatics of English Possessive Forms

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Although the DP analysis of genitive farms proposed by Abney (1987) seems to be basically correct, the present study has shown that there are many genitive forms in English that are not analyzable by it, and the compound analysis proposed by Taylor (1996) should be adopted for them. It was also shown that historically the compound genitives have been steadily increasing since the 16th century. The surveys I have conducted for the past three years in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the Great Britain revealed that they are increasing at the very present time. Therefore, they are important linguistic forms we can never ignore in any study of the genitive forms.This study found an interesting correlation between the compound analysis and the animacy condition. It is clear that the animacy condition is disappearing from English, especially from, journalism English. A new finding through this study is that it is disappearing from the compound genitives and it is alive in the genitive forms that are compatible with the DP analysis. Since the animacy condition is pragmatic in nature, it will be relevant to notice that the pragmatic condition is sensitive to the syntactic structure of the genitive forms, though this point has not yet fully evidenced. But this does not mean that the category Det is becoming unstable in present-day English. The surveys mentioned above demonstrate that predeterminers, such as all, both and halt; are shifting to the category of determiner. This shifting will be allowed only if Det is well established. Thus we can say that Det is well established in present-day English.To further motivate the claims made in this study, I will continue gathering data and pursue their consequences for the theory of language change