Why all John’s friends are Dutch, not German; on differences in West Germanic in the interaction between universal quantifiers and genitives

Abstract

Unlike English and Dutch, German does not allow a genitive to follow a universal quantifier: (i) All John’s friends… (ii) Al Jans vrienden… (Dutch) (iii) *All(e) Johanns Freunde… (German) In this article I show that this discrepancy results from two facts. Firstly, the German Saxon Genitive is a true case ending assigned in [Spec, NP] or [Spec, PossP] while in Dutch and English genitive case cannot be assigned at the N or n level (without a preposition) and the Saxon Genitive is more like a possessive adjective, initiating as the head of PossP and terminating in D. Secondly, in Germanic, D or [Spec, DP] must be overtly occupied in case of definiteness, and if the D node is already overtly occupied, and if genitive case has already been assigned, there is no motivation for moving a genitive phrase to the D level. I also show that Germanic dative of possession constructions (possessor doubling) can be explained within the same framework. Finally, there is a brief discussion of the potential applicability of this analysis to Scandinavian.

Keywords

• universal quantifier
• genitive
• possessive adjective
• definiteness
• Germanic