PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This paper deals with the status of the s-marker with personal names in German from a diachronic perspective. On the basis of corpus data it is argued that the deflexion of personal names in genitive phrases is much more advanced than it has been claimed in the literature: only the invariant marker ‑s occurs frequently, namely in constructions of the type Hildes Wohnung ‘Hilde’s flat’. Thus, it becomes obvious that such constructions, which are less widely studied than their English or Swedish counterparts, play a special role. It will be argued that an interpretation of the ‑s in these adnominal possessive constructions as a kind of prenominal genitive use fails. Given this, a comparison with the development of possessive ‑s in the history of English reveals that there are striking similarities with the developments in German.