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Re: Never violate a universal unless it seems like a good idea at the time

From:Doug Dee <amateurlinguist@...>
Date:Saturday, September 6, 2003, 12:23
In a message dated 9/5/2003 11:38:29 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
joe@WANTAGE.COM writes:


>It seems to me that a lot of Germanic languages violate #2. English, >Swedish, and at least bits of German.
English is mixed: The genitive "X's" precedes the head noun, but the genitive "of X" follows. Since "of X" is more common overall (or so I've read), English is mostly in conformity with #2. (Greenberg explicitly calls both of these "genitive" in his discussion.) Doug