Re: Inflecting Jesus Christ (was: Never violate a universal ...)

Quoting John Cowan <cowan@...>:

> Andreas Johansson scripsit:
>
> > > Do you have constructions in Swedish like "the mayor of Boston's hat"
> > > (standard)
> >
> > That particular one would be "Boston's mayor's hat", but there's parallel
> > examples, say _kungen av Bostons hatt_ "the king of Boston's hat".
>
> So there are lexical rules about when to use prep-genitive and when to
> use s-genetive?  "Boston's mayor" sounds unnatural in English, but
> no more or less so than "Boston's king" -- probably because the
> relationship is not possessive, and s-gen. is avoided when not
> possessive, except where both a subjective and an objective genitive
> are present, as in "John's adoption of Irene".
There's lexical rules, but they're quite complex - you can also get other
prepositions, and there's plenty of cases where there are possible alternative
constructions.

F'rinstance, "the king of Boston" and "the peak of the mountain" can be simply
_Bostons kung_ and _bergets topp_, but if you go analytical, they take
different prepositions; _kungen av Boston_ vs _toppen på berget_.

And this in my 'lect. No doubt, others will disagree on particular cases.

> > > or "That umbrella's the young lady I go with's" (colloquial)?
> >
> > Double genitive? Nope. But you could say _den unga damen jag går meds
> > paraply_, lit "the young lady I'm going with's umbrella".
>
> I misled you: the first "'s" is the verb "is".  I considered fixing this
> for clarity, but decided to leave it alone in the name of authenticity.
> So "the young lady I go with's" is formally parallel to "John's", but
> certainly an extreme case that would be edited out of formal prose.
OK. Pretty much like in Swedish then. Altho _den unga damen jag går ut meds
paraply_ doesn't sound particularly extreme - a bit informal, perhaps.

                                                      Andreas