ON THE DUAL NATURE OF THE POSSESSIVE MARKER IN MODERN ENGLISH

This paper shows, after Watkins (1967) and Tremblay (1989, 1991), that the possessive phrase of This is John's does not necessarily include an elliptical Possessee. This ambiguity is argued to arise from the du al nature of the possessive marker, which may either be inflectional o r derivational in Modern English. In the first case, it may be analyse d as a functional head, as proposed by Abney (1987) and Kayne (1993, 1 994); in the second case, it operates in the lexicon, deriving possess ive adjectives which exhibit complementary morphological and semantic properties in adnominal and predicate positions.