PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

In several Germanic languages, such as English and Swedish, the former genitive morpheme -s has developed into a possessive marker, which has been described as a special clitic by some scholars. Synchronic and diachronic corpus data as well as a comparison with English and Dutch show that German possessive -s is going through a similar, though less radical change as its Germanic counterparts, resulting in morphosyntactic variation. This high amount of synchronic and diachronic variation makes it hard to categorize -s in German. However, the marker can best be described as a bound element that gradually loses its paradigmaticity. This gradual rather than categorial change in progress on an affix-clitic-continuum challenges both synchronic as well as diachronic morpheme-based theoretical approaches.