Unrealised Possibilities

Linguists want simple, elegant, and convincing grammatical principles, but the degree to which actual linguistic constraints meet these criteria is often inversely correlated with the amount of their empirical coverage. The problem seems to be particularly strong in the domain of typological generalizations: there are only very few examples of crosslinguistic generalizations that hold without exceptions. Here, I would like to raise the question of whether some of the difficulties can be circumvented if we assume that linguistic communities do not always realize all the possibilities which their grammars allow. What might constitute an unrealised possibility is perhaps best exemplified by prenominal genitives in German. Often, they are considered ungrammatical, or restricted to non-complex genitives, as (1a) vs. (1b) suggests. (1b) is certainly ungrammatical since it violates the adjacency condition for heads in the prenominal domain that is also exemplified by prenominal adjectives, as the contrast between (1c) and (1d) illustrates. The factor ruling out (1b) does not block complex prenominal genitives. While (1e) and (1f) sound fairly acceptable to a certain extent, slight lexical variation leads to a decrease in acceptability. (1) a. Marias Mutter Mary’s mother b. *der Frau mit dem Hut Buch the woman with the hat’s boo