THE ENGLISH “GROUP GENITIVE” IS A SPECIAL CLITIC

This paper addresses the properties of the English possessive construction, a structure in which a single marker 's appears at the right edge of a possessor DP of arbitrary length. After surveying the properties of the construction, it is argued (following Anderson (2005)) that it is best seen as involving a "special clitic," phrasal morphology that reflects a functional feature assigned to the DP, rather than edge-inflection, the realization of a grammatical property by an inflected form of the rightmost (or leftmost) word of the phrase to which it applies. The properties of possessive pronouns are discussed & it is shown that their lexical forms provide an explanation of their apparent exceptionality on the special clitic account. The phonology of the marker is discussed, & its interaction with other inflections is accounted for. A number of other consequences are derived from the phrasal morphology analysis. References. Adapted from the source document