Re: Genitive relationships (WAS: Construct States)

A further note:  The a-pulling construction that you say derives from
the gerund probably didn't come into use in the Old English period.
But after waes teonende/apulliende had turned into "was pulling," maybe only
THEN did it acquire this Celtic flavor  on-pulling, a-pulling, with
analogues in Welsh _yn tunnu_.  But note that by the time pulling
has become the "gerund,"  it's no longer wondered at that the English
form has derived from a participle and not the infinitive.  I think this
clarifies the confusion.

(ge)teon?  tynnu?   Hmm.   ;-) ;-) ;-)  You can start seeing similarities
all over the place.

Sally Caves wrote:

> Raymond A. Brown wrote:
>
> > At 7:13 pm -0800 9/3/99, Sally Caves wrote:
> > >Raymond A. Brown wrote:
> > >
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> Nor did English use the present participle!
> > >
> > >Sure it did!  Ic waes sprecende.   At least Bede's
> > >translators so use it.
> >
> > OK.
> >
> > >> The older form was: "I am a-pulling"  = *I am on pulling.  The prefixed a-
> > >> is a watered down form of 'on'.
> > >
> > >Yes, but did the on precede the inflected infinitive or the present
> > >participle?
> > >I think the latter.  Ic waes on sprecende.  Older than what?
> >
> > *ic waes on sprecende - doesn't seem to make much sense to me.
>
> Why not?  Sprecend readily takes conjugated forms.  Often they are treatedlike
> adjectives, but they acquire substantive meaning, as in _reordberend_,
> "speech-bearing one."  I have no problem seeing the pres.part. as the precursor
> to the MnE "gerund," which is not quite the same as an infinitive.  The inflected
> infinitive,
> and I can go to the concordance to check this, is usually used only after _to_.
> This has given us our present use of the infinitive with a "to" in front of it.
> I explain to my students that this is not the basic infinitive.  The basic
> infinitive
> is found in such constructions as "I can go, I must go, He had me go home."
> Occasionally we use the infinitive gerundively, as in "To know him is to love
> him," but more often we say "Loving someone is more important that earning
> money."
>
> My Mitchell and Robinson gives an account of the inflected infinitive, and
> never mentions any other preposition, and in my reading of this language
> I've found no instances of _on sprecanne_ or any such construction.
> And it doesn't make sense to ME for the reasons I give below about the
> gerund.
>
> > I've always understood it was neither of them but that it was the _gerund_
> > which ended in -ing & is cognate with the Modern German ending -ung.
>
> Sprecende furnished the form for what we know of as the gerund.Isn't it -end that
> is cognate with MnG -ung?  In Middle English you have a
> wide variety of this -end ending: -and, -ung, -yng... all over England
>
> > That would surely account for the use of 'of' before the direct object.
>
> If you can accept that our gerund is derived from the present participleand not
> the infinitive, then your questions will be answered.   Ditto for
> below.
>
> > I've always understood that the modern 'I was going...' derived from the
> > older and now largely obsolete 'I was a-going...' (I believe such forms
> > still survive in some parts of the US - tho maybe that is another Brit.
> > myth :)
>
> No, they do.
>
> Sally Caves
> http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/verbs.html
> http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/recipes.html
>
> Tenuo al aittear; kraiko al ofykya, edrime al imuif.
> Winter is my name, cessation my business, sleep my gift.
> (An old Caves poem).