Functional explanations of prenominal possessors in attributive possessive constructions: Dynamic evidence from Czech
Abstrakt
As evidenced in Gebauer (2007), the position of pronominal and adjectival PRs relative to the head noun changed from predominantly postnominal to prenominal between 14th and 18th century. Discourse status of the PR can be analyzed as one of the triggers for this change.
On the other hand, we expected to find no such effect for nonpossessive adjectives, which nevertheless underwent similar change. To test this, we compared internal word order of NPs with prototypical human animate attributive PRs with NPs with non-possessive adjectives.
We predicted this change to have been caused by an interaction of discourse status of the PR (a general functional principle) and structural analogy driven by the shared agreement properties of both types of modifiers (language internal factors). This change reflects a structural shift of PRs from a postnominal genitive construction to a prenominal monolexemic PR construction.
Our dataset consisted of 5,000 NPs modified by attributive PRs or non-possessive adjectives which were randomly sampled from Vokabulař webový, a 5 mil. token data bank of old and middle Czech texts (i.e. 14th-18th century). We coded the concordances for following variables: origin (original/translated), genre, and dating of the text, semantic characteristics of the modifier (referential type of the PR) and its morphosyntactic properties (i.e. modification and coordination), morphosyntactic characteristics of the NP (i.e. case, headedness, embedding, number of modifiers and projectivity), information status of the NP (following Lambrecht 1996 and Hajičová et al. 1998), and discourse status of the PR.
The data were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively, using generalized linear mixed-effects modeling in the latter case (Hilpert & Gries 2010).