Re: Eliding repeated morphemes: synthesis vs analysis

On Sun, 26 Dec 2004 10:24:19 -0500, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
> Consider the
> English possessive in -'s, for instance.  Is that considered an analytic or
> synthetic feature?  We say "Mark and Jody's house", not "Mark's and
> Jody's house".  Is that "Mark and (Jody's)", with the -'s simply understood
> to be applied to "Mark" as well, or is it "(Mark and Jody)'s", with
> the -'s actually being applied to the phrase as a whole?
I'd say the latter -- compare also things such as "The King of
Sweden's throne", which is not *"The King's of Sweden throne" (an
ungrammatical sentence for me) as it would be in, say, German ("Des
Königs von Schweden Thron", though a much more usual word order would
be "Der Thron des Königs von Schweden").

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