A Parametric Syntax Approach to the Emergence of Non-Agreeing Possessive Appositives in the History of English

In this paper I take up two appositive constructions observed in the history of English, namely, Split Genitive and Non-Agreeing Possessive Appositive (NAPA), and offer an explanation for the emergence of NAPA in the Early ME period (EME). In Split Genitive, both parts of the appositive carry genitive case, while in NAPA only the first part of it does, its second part having no inflection. Lightfoot (1999), for example, gives an account of this fact in terms of the loss of morphological case and the reanalysis of genitive case as a clitic. Allen (2002), on the other hand, accounts for it by associating a principle of Morphological Blocking with an agreement in DP. Certainly, these two analyses are valid for explaining this case, but they cannot unify it with the other diachronic changes discussed in Watanabe (forthcoming) which took place almost simultaneously in the transition form OE to ME. Considering these drawbacks of the two previous analyses, then, I provide an alternative explanation for it in terms of the feature classification parameter proposed by Watanabe.Article