Case and agreement in possessive noun phrases in mainly English, Swedish, and Finnish

The paper is based on a set of observations about the prenominal possessive construction in English, Swedish, Finnish, and Hungarian. These include the fact that coordination of possessive pronouns is degraded in English (??your and my home), but not in the other languages and that the adnominal pronoun construction (APC) we children cannot have a genitive pronoun in English or Swedish (*our children home) but can do in Finnish. On the other hand Finnish and Hungarian do not show possessive agreement when the possessor is an APC. These observations can be explained if the possessive construction has the structure [Poss [NP DP N]], where Poss hosts a set of unvalued φ-features valued by the possessor DP. In En- glish and Swedish, Poss is spelled out as a genitive pronoun (my, her, our, etc.). In Finnish and Hungarian it is spelled out as a possessive agreement suffix. In all the languages this is the case only when the possessor DP is a bare pronoun: Poss does not agree with a lexical DP. This is couched in a version of the theory of agreement and incorporation in Roberts (2010a,b)