Skip to content

Booksellers & Trade Customers: Sign up for online bulk buying at trade.atlanticbooks.com for wholesale discounts

Booksellers: Create Account on our B2B Portal for wholesale discounts

Dative External Possessors in Early English

by Cynthia L. Allen
Save 17% Save 17%
Current price ₹10,033.00
Original price ₹12,040.00
Original price ₹12,040.00
Original price ₹12,040.00
(-17%)
₹10,033.00
Current price ₹10,033.00

Imported Edition - Ships in 18-21 Days

Free Shipping in India on orders above Rs. 500

Request Bulk Quantity Quote
+91
Book cover type: Hardcover
  • ISBN13: 9780198832263
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • Subject: N/A
  • Publisher: Oxford Univ PR
  • Publisher Imprint: Oxford Univ PR
  • Publication Date:
  • Pages: 308
  • Original Price: GBP 70.0
  • Language: English
  • Edition: N/A
  • Item Weight: 613 grams
  • BISAC Subject(s): Linguistics / Historical & Comparative

This volume is the first systematic, corpus-based examination of dative external possessors in Old and Early Middle English and their diachronic development. Modern English is unusual among European languages in not having a productive dative external possessor construction, whereby the possessor is in the dative case and behaves like an element of the sentence rather than part of the possessive phrase. This type of construction was found in Old English, however, especially in expressions of inalienable possession; it appeared in variation with the internal possessors in the genitive case, which then became the only productive possibility in Middle English.

In this book, Cynthia Allen traces the use of dative external possessors in the texts of the Old and early Middle English periods and explores how the empirical data fit with the hypotheses put forward to date. She draws on recent developments in linguistic theory to evaluate both language-internal explanations for the loss of the dative construction and the possible role of language contact, especially with the Brythonic Celtic languages. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of historical syntax and morphology, language variation and change, and the comparative syntax of the Germanic languages.

Cynthia L. Allen is a Fellow Emerita at the Australian National University and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in recognition of her work in the history of English morphosyntax. She is the author of two previous OUP monographs examining the relationship between case marking loss and syntactic changes in English: Case Marking and Reanalysis (1995; paperback 1999) and Genitives in Early English (2008). She is a co-founder and current editorial board member of the de Gruyter Mouton series 'Studies in Language Change' and serves on the editorial board of OUP's "Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics."

Trusted for over 49 years

Family Owned Company

Secure Payment

All Major Credit Cards/Debit Cards/UPI & More Accepted

New & Authentic Products

India's Largest Distributor

Need Support?

Whatsapp Us