The Origins of the ‘Group Genitive’ in English

Abstract

The 'group genitive' occurring in expressions such as the king of England's daughter is first found in English texts of the late fourteenth century. In this paper, the relationship between the syncretism of cases and the appearance of this new genitive is investigated, as well as the relationship between the new construction and 'separated genitives' such as Adam his son. A systematic examination of Middle and Early Modern English texts yields evidence that the group genitive could not have been a reanalysis of the separated genitive, as has sometimes been suggested, and suggests that the separated genitive of Middle English was an orthographical variant of the old inflectional genitive (although a different analysis must be given for some Early Modern English texts). The evidence suggests that the group genitive developed when the old inflectional genitive in -(e) s was generalised to all noun classes and became reanalysed as a clitic.