Phrasal affixes
The English possessive marker-’s is somewhat difficult to analyze, and has been the topic of much debate. It is obviously not a phonological word in its own right, since it contains no vowels.1 Some people have analyzed it as a clitic post position, partly based on the similarity of meaning and function between the possessive-’s and the preposition of. But this analysis is thrown into doubt by the fact that there are no other postpositions in English. Prepositions in English always precede their object, whereas the possessive-’s always follows the NP which it is associated with. On the other hand, there is no other lexical category to which we could reasonably assign-’s if we need to recognize it as a syntactically independent word.
Another possible analysis might be to treat it as a suffix marking genitive case. This seems plausible, since many languages do use affixes to mark case. The problem is that, affixes are usually restricted to appearing only on stems of a certain category. The possessive-’s marks NPs, but it does not always attach to the head noun, or to any noun. Rather, it attaches to the last word in the NP, whether that word is a noun, verb, preposition, etc.
(10) the Queen of England’s crown
a man I know’s oldest son
the woman you were talking with’s daughter
So the possessive-’s looks very much like an affix which takes an entire noun phrase as its host, rather than any individual word in that phrase. Elements of this kind are sometimes referred to as PHRASAL AFFIXES (Nevis1988).
Let us summarize the differences between these two types of simple clitic. Bound words have most of the properties of “normal” words: they belong to one of the regular lexical categories of the language; often occur in the same positions as free words of the same category; and can carry the same range of meanings as any other word in that category. However, unlike normal words, they are phonologically dependent.
Phrasal affixes have most of the properties of “normal” affixes: they are always attached to another word; do not fit in to any of the established lexical categories (parts of speech) for the language; and tend to express grammatical (specifically inflectional) rather than lexical meanings. However, unlike normal affixes, they are “promiscuous” in their attachments, meaning that they may attach to words of almost any category. Rather than being bound to a particular class of stems, their position is defined relative to the boundaries of a particular kind of phrase.
1. More precisely, no syllabic segments.
