Re: Case

> Date:         Wed, 14 Jul 1999 20:26:30 -0500
> From: Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
> I suspect it's probably pretty rare, but I do know of one case -
> English's -'s ending, which has detached from the noun and moved to the
> end of the noun phrase, as in "the man I met last night's car", so, I
> suppose it's not totally unreasonable that case-suffixes could detach in
> the way Nicole proposed.
Danish is doing the same thing (and has been doing it from before the
current heavy English influence began).

But on top of that, I believe that the -s in Danish is beginning to be
able to 'decliticize' and form an independent phonological word under
special circumstances. One is when a speaker has started out with a
full noun phrase without -s, and wants to save their sentence by
making it genitive. Instead of repeating the last word with -s or
using a resumptive pronoun, 's' comes out alone, strongly stressed,
sometimes after a pause of a second or two.

Another is after complex noun phrases like Nick's example above.
Again, the -s is strongly stressed, sometimes more strongly than the
word it's attached to.

Perhaps by the time my grandchildren are old, Danish will have a
genitive postposition 'es'.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)