'Gylbart off kynloth lande': The uninflected genitive and the group genitive in Older Scots

Abstract

The present paper studies the genitive construction in Older Scots using the largest corpus available for this period: The Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots (LAOS). It focuses, on the one hand, on the uninflected genitive, analysing its frequency in the different contexts in which it is found and, on the other, on complex structures such as the split and the group genitive. The results are compared to those obtained for other varieties (Allen 1998, Myers 2009) in order to establish whether there are differences with respect to these constructions. The historical data obtained from LAOS are also used to test some of the theories and hypotheses formulated about the genitive, such as those proposed by Seppänen (1997) or Allen (1997).