Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 21, Issue 1, 1997

Why does an English speaker use an inflected possessive like 'The president's daughter" rather than a prepositional possessive like "The daughter of the president?" This question has intrigued linguists for decades. Traditional grammarians (see Curme 1947) defined and classified the relationships coded by each of the possessive forms. Transformational grammarians (see Jacobson 1968) wrote rules to transform deep structure of constructions into surface structure inflected noun phrases. Most recently, researchers (Quirk 1972, Hawkins 1981) have proposed that the use of the inflected construction is related to the position of the modifier NP on an animacy hierarchy. What all these attempts at explaining the inflected/ prepositional variation in English possessives have in common is their use of intuited data: that is, subjective judgements about whether a particular noun phrase taken out of context is grammatical, ungrammatical or "questionable". This paper attempts to answer the question initially posed in this paragraph through an appeal to actual spoken and written English by means of a database of possessive noun phrases. It concludes that four basic criteria are involved in the choice of one possessive construction over another. One of these is animacy, but a more important factor, not heretofore considered for modern English, is the information status of the two constituent NPs.

In Dolakha Newari, the dative case marks recipients of ditransitive verbs and some patients of monotransitive verbs. Quantative studies show that animacy and activation cost are both relevant in determining the distribution of dative case. Two theories on the syntactic status of objects in systems of this general type are shown to be inadequate for Dolakha. Instead it is found that there is no morphological or syntactic evidence for differentiating between classes of object in this language. Theories on the motivation of this pattern are considered, and it is concluded that it is best understood in terms of referent importance or topicworthiness.

A number of arguments are given against the traditional word order typology based on the six types SOV, SVO, VSO, VOS, OVS, and OSV, and in favour of an alternative typology based on two binary parameters OV vs. VO and SV vs. VS. The arguments given include ones based on various advantages of collapsing VSO and VOS into a single type, the infrequency of clauses containing a noun subject and noun object, the value of isolating the more predictive parameter of OV vs. VO, and the fact that the traditional typology ignores the position of intransitive subjects.

The double-object construction has always been a controversial issue in linguistic theory. In Chinese we encounter an interesting and peculiar situation: both Mandarin and Cantonese have the dative construction with the indirect object (IO) introduced by a dative preposition (V + DO + Prep. + IO), but when the preposition is absent, the indirect object always precedes the direct object (DO)) in Mandarin (V + IO + DO), while the reverse order is predominant in Cantonese (V + DO + IO).What is the origin of the Cantonese form V + DO + IO? In many previous studies, V + DO + IO is said to come from V + IO + DO. In this paper we first show that neither synchronic nor diachronic evidence favors the Movement Hypothesis that V + DO + IO is derived from V + IO + DO. The former is not a free variant of the latter. We then argue, synchronically and diachronically, that V + DO + IO is derived from V + DO + Prep. + IO by Preposition Deletion. The two forms share the same constraints in relation to the semantic nature of the verbs and the focus information transmitted by the two objects (DO and IO).