Re: Theory about the evolution of languages

On Thu, 19 Aug 2004 18:10:59 -0500, Mark P. Line <mark@...> wrote:
> 2. Clitics can't go just anywhere. They're just as much a part of the
> morphosyntax and phonology of the language as any other. (A counterexample
> would have to be a clitic that can attach to any word of any sentence,
> while producing some coherently modified meaning of any constituent it
> might thereby make itself part of. That's not very likely, is it.)
Well, consider a cliticised version of "only"; it can go, perhaps not
just anywhere, but before a wide range of positions in a sentence.
Compare:

Only Tom saw the cat
Tom only saw the cat
Tom saw only the cat
and even
Tom saw the only cat
though "only" has a different usage in that last sentence.


On Thu, 19 Aug 2004 18:41:03 -0500, Mark P. Line <mark@...> wrote:
> The dialect I'm actually fluent in doesn't have genitive forms like these,
> so somebody who's a native speaker of the standard language should answer:
> what if the title is 'Herr' instead of 'Onkel'? I know most people where I
> lived would say 'Herr Enterichs Millionen' when they were trying to mimic
> the standard language
That's what I'd say, too.

> is this supposed to be 'Herrn Enterichs Millionen' in standard?
Uh... now you've made me unsure.

A quick google for "Herrn Müllers" finds quite a few hits (several
hundred, though not thousands of them -- but more than for "Herr
Müllers"), both for "ART NOUN Herrn Müllers" and for "Herrn Müllers
NOUN", so you may well be right.

However, if that's the "correct" grammar in the standard, I'd say it's
at least slightly marked as +formal. Not sure whether "Herr Müllers X"
is wrong, but it's certainly what quite a few people would say in
everyday speech.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

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