The ongoing eclipse of possessive suffixes in North Saami

North Saami is replacing the use of possessive suffixes on nouns with a morphologically simpler analytic construction. Our data (>2K examples culled from >.5M words) track this change through three generations, covering parameters of semantics, syntax and geography. Intense contact pressure on...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Diachronica
Main Authors: Janda, Laura A., Antonsen, Lene
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: John Benjamins Publishing Company 2016
Subjects:
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/dia.33.3.02jan
http://www.jbe-platform.com/deliver/fulltext/dia.33.3.02jan.pdf
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Summary:North Saami is replacing the use of possessive suffixes on nouns with a morphologically simpler analytic construction. Our data (>2K examples culled from >.5M words) track this change through three generations, covering parameters of semantics, syntax and geography. Intense contact pressure on this minority language probably promotes morphological simplification, yielding an advantage for the innovative construction. The innovative construction is additionally advantaged because it has a wider syntactic and semantic range and is indispensable, whereas its competitor can always be replaced. The one environment where the possessive suffix is most strongly retained even in the youngest generation is in the Nominative singular case, and here we find evidence that the possessive suffix is being reinterpreted as a Vocative case marker.