So let’s talk about possession.
Most days, we feel like ourselves; the world makes sense, and we’re in control of our decisions.
But if we’re sleepy, or in a bad mood, it can feel like we’ve been taken over by someone else entirely.
And the same thing can happen to words.
After all, nouns like “son” or “daughter” can refer to just about anybody, but slap
a name on the front and you get whole new characters, like “Edward’s son” or “Edward’s daughter."
So how is all of this put together, and do we have to turn our syntactic theory on its head
to account for it?
I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is The Ling Space.
One of the most fundamental ways to relate two things to each other is through possession.
We can talk about ownership, like how I have a cat.
Or we can talk about more social relationships, like how maybe you’ve got a sister or a brother,
or how The Ling Space has a director.
And we can connect ourselves to our own bodies, too, like how as a human, I’m the proud
owner of one spectacular brain!
To do this, we use sentences with verbs like “have” and “got” and “own,” to
help represent different kinds of associations.
But we don’t always have to make a whole sentence to see these kinds of connections
play out in language.
Often, we only have to slap together a run-of-the-mill noun phrase.
For example, in French the phrase “l’ordinateur d’Elliot” refers to a computer that
belongs to Elliot, with nary a verb in sight.
And in Japanese, that same object can be picked out using the phrase “エリオットのパソコン”,
with the particle “の” serving to mark the link between the two.
And often, a language will offer its users many ways to express this kind of relationship.
In Dutch, you can use a preposition like you can in French to say something like “the house of John."
Or, you can mark the possessor with a special suffix.
And English has these options, too.
We can say either “the computer of Elliot,” or the more natural-sounding “Elliot’s computer."
So to start getting a handle on what the structures of these options look like, and how they fit
overall into our theory of syntax, let’s zoom in on English.
The syntax of noun phrases is something we’ve looked at before.
In our very first episode about X’ Theory, we talked about how all phrases of all categories,
be they nouns, verbs, adjectives, whatever, fit into the same basic template.
So for a noun like “crowds,” which you might find on its own in a sentence like “crowds
marched in the streets,” we’ve got the head noun itself, and an N’ layer just above
it, all neatly packaged together inside of a noun phrase.
That extra bit of structure doesn’t do much in simpler cases.
But when we start adding prepositional phrases and determiners, well, we’re going to need the space!
Take a phrase like “a crowd of protesters”.
Around the head “crowd”, there’s the specifier position, way up at the top of the
NP, where the determiner “a” goes.
And that prepositional phrase “of protesters” sits down in what’s called the complement position.
That lonely DP — with its single, solitary determiner — can make the tree seem a bit
empty up there.
But given that we also see more top-heavy possessive phrases like “the corporation’s
CEO,” it looks like full noun phrases can fit in that specifier position, too.
At first glance, this looks like a reasonable way to represent possession inside of noun phrases.
But if we focus in on these structures more closely, we start to see some inconsistencies.
Like, what exactly is that little ‘s’ suffix in phrases like “Elliot’s computer”
or “the group’s secret hideout”?
One obvious answer is that it’s just a suffix, a little meaningful bit stuck on the end of the word.
The problem, though, is it doesn’t do a very good job of acting like one.
For one, while it for sure points out the part of the noun phrase that’s doing the possessing,
it doesn’t always link up to it in the most direct way; sometimes, it can actually show
up pretty far from where it should be.
In “the Senior VP of Technology’s mysterious disappearance,” it’s pretty
clear that what disappeared was the Senior VP, not the technology.
But it’s the “technology” — and not “VP” — that bears the suffix.
What’s also weird is that suffixes usually only fasten themselves to one kind of word.
The suffix “-less” typically latches onto nouns and turns them into adjectives meaning
“without that noun,” like in “fearless” or “limitless.”
But you never find it on a verb or an adjective, so “speak-less” or “alone-less” are not words.
And the superlative suffix “-est” will always hook onto an adjective, making words
like “scariest” or “fastest.”
But you won’t ever see it hanging around nouns and verbs; there’s no “society-est” or "investigate-est."
But when we take a look at which categories of word the possessive suffix can cozy up to,
it seems to be all over the place!
In “the person thought to be responsible’s plan,” it’s up against an adjective, and
in “the suspect we arrested’s ID,” it’s next to a verb.
A better way of thinking about that little possessive “s” is as something that targets
the whole phrase doing the possessing, and then sticks itself onto the end of it.
It treats the NP that comes before it like a single unit, no matter how big.
Almost as if it’s looking for a chunk of syntax -- a phrase instead of a word.
But as strange as a ‘phrase-seeking suffix’ might sound, it’s actually something we
see crop up in other parts of language, too.
The modal verb in a sentence like “Someone from the Dark Army will contact you” can
shorten and cling onto the subject, making it “Someone from the Dark Army’ll contact you."
And we also see this kind of contraction in words like “not,” “would,” and “have.”
When a morpheme that normally stands alone gets shrunken down so much that it has to
grab onto the nearest word around just to stay afloat, it becomes what’s known as a clitic.
Clitics look a little bit like bound morphemes, but come from fully formed words that usually
make up part of the syntax of a sentence.
And they tend to be far less picky about what they attach to than your average affix.
So if the right way to think about that possessive suffix is as some sort of clitic, that means
it doesn’t really come packaged together with the word that it ends up attached to.
Instead, it starts off separately, in some other part of the tree.
And then, it gloms onto the phrase right before it, because it’s not independent enough
to stand on its own.
But where exactly is it coming from?
One clue comes from the strong similarities we see between noun phrases and sentences.
In our episode about compound words, we talked about how nouns that used to be verbs sort
of ‘inherit’ some of those verb-y traits.
Like, take the word “hack,” which is a transitive verb that needs a subject and a direct object.
It fits comfortably into a sentence like “Elliot’s hacking the company.”
But if you think about it, the word “hack” fits just as well into a noun phrase as it
does into a sentence, as in “Elliot’s hacking of the company.”
Since we know from our recent episode on the structure of clauses that sentences are tense
phrases — or TPs — the tree for our sentence looks like this.
This suggests that noun phrases might be built up in a similar way, with the possessor subject
at the top, the noun phrase at the bottom, and some extra structure sitting in between.
Since we’ve been looking for somewhere to put our possessive clitic anyway, that spot
in the middle sure seems like a good place!
And this new structure explains why that “s” has to follow
everything that comes before it, instead of landing directly on the noun inside.
But what about those question marks?
Well, the final piece of this puzzle comes from the fact that we never see possessive
clitics and determiners in the same place at the same time.
For instance, you can’t say something like “Elliot’s the hacking of the company”.
And we know the “a” in “a dog’s toys” goes with “dog” and not “toys,” since
you can’t say “a toys”.
Since we get either a clitic stuck on some phrase or a determiner by itself, but never
both, they look to be two sides of the same coin.
So, it’s safe to conclude that they share a category.
In other words, those mysterious blank bits in our tree form a determiner phrase, or DP.
And because any old noun can have a possessor - even ones that didn’t start life out
as a verb — we can generalize this idea to all noun phrases.
Even proper names end up being DPs, since many languages need determiners, as in “la
Chine” for “China” in French or “die Merkel” in some varieties of German.
So now, we’ve turned our system inside out!
Before we had noun phrases with determiner phrases inside them, but the ‘DP Hypothesis’
says that it’s really the other way around: noun phrases have determiner phrases wrapped
around them like a comfy hoodie.
And while this strange turn of events has given our otherwise lazy determiners more
of a job to do, the change isn’t just cosmetic.
As one of the more counter-intuitive proposals to come out of the study of syntax, the DP
Hypothesis has had a big influence on our understanding of noun phrases.
It’s as if determiners had been trapped inside the whole time, just waiting to burst
out and take over the reins!
For one, it helps to explain why noun phrases can contain more than one determiner at a time.
In phrases like “all the members” or “those two employees,” instead of finding
some way to stuff all those determiners inside one noun phrase, we can just stack the different
kinds of DPs on top of each other.
And besides cementing the bond between noun phrases and full clauses, the idea also manages
to capture the structure of small clauses.
In “he considers Angela a friend,” that “Angela a friend” bit counts as a clause,
since it’s made of a subject-predicate pair.
But as the name suggests, small clauses have no tense, no modals or auxiliaries or linking
verbs — no inflection of any kind.
On account of this, it doesn’t really make sense to label them as TPs.
But that means there’s no clear way for the subject to join together with the predicate.
Solving this problem under the old way of doing things, we might have tried putting
the subject “Angela” in the specifier of the NP, almost like it was a possessor.
But, that determiner gets in the way.
In our new system, Angela has her own reserved parking at the front of the DP.
Everything clicks into place!
So whether we’re scrutinizing the syntax of possession or studying the structure of clauses,
the DP Hypothesis has definitely given noun phrases a new personality!
So, we’ve reached the end of The Ling Space for this week.
If you possessed the right amount of determination, you learned that the possessive suffix in
English isn’t really a suffix at all, but instead a kind of little word that sticks
onto whatever’s beside it; that because of how language works, our old picture of
a noun phrase with a determiner in it just doesn’t hack it; that the idea of noun phrases
being inside determiner phrases does a better job of explaining what’s going on; and that
this new structure also accounts for the close ties between noun phrases and clauses, both big and small.
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman, and directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost.
This week’s episode was written by Stephan Hurtubise.
Our editor is Georges Coulombe, our music is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE.
We’re down in the comments below, or you can bring the discussion back over to our
website, where we’ll have some extra material on this topic.
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And we’ll see you in two weeks. Vi ses!