A Minimalist approach to English Possessive Case

Abstract

In English, possessive case appears in two positions. One is the prenominal position, as in (1a. b), and the other is the subject position of the gerund, especially, the POSS(ESSIVE)-ING, CONSTRUCTION, as in (1c). (1) a. John's book b. the enemy's destruction of the city c. John's refusing the offer. Since Chomsky (1981) presented the overall framework of the Principles-and-Parameters theory, there have been some attempts to account for English possessive Case. First of all, Chomsky (1986a) proposes two kinds of Case: structural Case and inherent Case. Possessive Case, in his framework, belongs to inherent Case which must observe the uniformity condition. But his proposal leaves many problems, conceptually and empirically. Abney (1986) and Fukui & Speas (1986) suggest many arguments for analyzing noun phrases as DP's. Within DP-analysis, possessive Case is assigned by the functional category D (= 's).