In:Historical Linguistics 2007: Selected papers from the 18th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Montreal, 6–11 August 2007
Edited by Monique Dufresne, Fernande Dupuis and Etleva Vocaj
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 308] 2009
► pp. 49–60
On the disappearance of genitive types in Middle English
Objective genitives with nouns of love and fear and the nature of syntactic change
Published online: 30 November 2009
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.308.04all
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.308.04all
This paper looks at the disappearance of the ‘objective’ genitive with nouns of emotion in which the Stimulus of Emotion is a prenominal genitive, e.g. godes lufu ‘God’s love’ in the meaning of someone’s love towards God. A systematic corpus-based investigation involving three nouns of emotion indicates that this construction was obsolescent by the end of the Middle English period. I suggest that the favouring of of phrases over genitives reduced the evidence available to language learners necessary to construct grammars incorporating a marked assignment of semantic to grammatical roles.
