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Early stages of the ‘his genitive’: Separated genitives in Old English

Paper · 2017 · Rodrigo Pérez Lorido and Patricia Casado Núñez

Summary

The paper asks whether the 'his genitive' (separated genitive, e.g. Heraclius his sone) already existed in Old English. The dominant view, associated with Allen, holds that it first appears around 1250 and that earlier examples have other explanations. The authors note that the debate kept recycling the same handful of examples, so they ran a systematic corpus search. Their material was twelve prose texts taken from the York-Toronto-Helsinki corpus of syntactically annotated Old English prose, together with the Paris Psalter and Marsden's edition of the Heptateuch. With CorpusSearch2 they queried the pattern NP + possessive pronoun + NP and checked each hit by hand. Uncertain cases were resolved using other manuscripts, the Latin sources and the editors' notes.

The result is a small but real set of separated genitives. The construction appears in several clause positions, which argues against a left-dislocation analysis. The authors conclude that it resembled Germanic possessor doubling and was probably not the direct source of the Middle English his genitive. However, it made speakers familiar with the NP + Poss + NP pattern.

Key points

  • The data come from 14 analysed texts: roughly 702,000 words of prose from the York Corpus (Alfredian, Ælfrician and Wulfstan material, plus the Herbarium and Medicina de Quadrupedibus), the Paris Psalter and the Old English Heptateuch.
  • The search found 15 possible separated genitives in 6 of the 14 texts. Seven had been cited before in the literature, and the other eight are new.
  • The possessive marker is not only his. It also appears as feminine hire/hyre and plural heora/hiera (e.g. Asia & Europe hiera landgemircu).
  • Possessors are mostly dative, but a few take the case required by the clause. A manuscript copied about a century later turns a dative possessor into a nominative one.
  • The last Old English examples date from the mid-11th century and systematic Middle English use begins in the mid-13th century, leaving a gap of about two centuries. For comparison, Layamon's Brut MS O alone has 142 his genitives.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The authors cast a deliberately broad structural query (NP + Poss + NP) and then hand-filter the known false positives such as appositions and ditransitives, which gives high recall before precision is applied.
  • I2. They resolve doubtful hits with independent witnesses: parallel manuscripts, the Latin source text and editorial commentary.
  • I3. Distribution serves as a diagnostic: because the construction occurs as object and as prepositional complement, it cannot just be left dislocation.
  • I4. Evidence that cannot discriminate is set aside: a dative governed by a preposition tells nothing about the possessor's case.
  • I5. Rarity is separated from error: a low count spread across several texts and genres is taken as a real grammatical option, not a slip.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tree): Run the same tree pattern over parsed text to collect candidates for "John his car"-type possessor doubling, then sort them against apposition and double-object readings before fixing the attachment.
  • I2 (learn): Treat disagreements among witness parsers the same way, escalating only the unresolved candidates to an LLM teacher tier or to a parallel or translated text.
  • I3 (frames): When deciding whether a fronted NP is a topic or a true possessor, check whether the pattern also occurs in non-initial slots, and assign the possessor role only when it does.
  • I4 (learn): Build evaluation sets with controls that exclude contexts where the feature is forced by something else, so a rule is not credited for confounded cases.
  • I5 (world): When compiling knowledge or construction inventories, weigh how widely a rare pattern is spread across sources, not just its raw frequency, before discarding it as noise.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Universidad de OviedoOviedo · Spain4 works · 2,015 citations

📚 Shelves 2 Arts and Humanities · 9,296 works Language and Linguistics · 9,206 works

🧭 Topics 2 English · 1,373 works Historical linguistics & language change · 159 works

Cite

Cite as Rodrigo Pérez Lorido and Patricia Casado Núñez. 2017. Early stages of the ‘his genitive’: Separated genitives in Old English. SELIM 22.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.17811/selim.22.2017.45-75

@inproceedings{lorido2017early,
  title = {{Early stages of the ‘his genitive’: Separated genitives in Old English}},
  author = {Rodrigo Pérez Lorido and Patricia Casado Núñez},
  booktitle = {SELIM 22},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.17811/selim.22.2017.45-75},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.22.2017.45-75}
}

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