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1 results

  • 16 - Dative and Genitive Variability in the History of English

  • from Part II - Tracking Change in the History of English
  • Edited by Joan C. Beal, University of Sheffield
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge History of the English Language
    Published online:
    23 October 2025
    Print publication:
    23 October 2025, pp 449-479

  • Summary

    From the Middle English period grammatical relations that used to be coded by case-marked forms in Old English were increasingly expressed by prepositional constructions, without however completely replacing the former. Two prominent syntactic alternations arose as a result of this development, that is the dative and genitive variations: (1) Dative variation: John gave Mary a book vs. John gave a book to Mary. (2) Genitive variation: the king’s horse vs. the horse of the king. This chapter brings together research on these alternations, tracing their emergence and development, and focusing on the role of harmonic alignment (in particular, animacy). Although they are separate alternations, one operating on the VP level (datives) and the other on the NP level (genitives), their development shows some parallels, which are attributed to analogy based on functional overlap across the two alternations.