Descriptive genitive and determiners

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Descriptive Genitive and Determiners
Literature puts into use genitive determiner as either acting like determiner or not, depending on the syntactic structure of a sentence. Genitives that work as determiners tend not to occur together with other determiners. There are mostly the possessive genitives. An example is “these lady’s shoes.” On the other hand, the genitives that do not function as determiners in a sentence tend to occur with other determiners and based on the structure of the sentence, the end up an adjective. An example is “an excessively short two weeks’ notice.” In this case, the genitive functions as an adjective instead of a possessive genitive. Removing the determine “an” in the sentence ends up making the sentence ungrammatically correct. Therefore, the descriptive genitive plays a role as direct modifiers since unlike determines, it posses a theta-theoretic property that makes it function as an adjective in the sentence.
Furthermore, direct modifiers structures have limitation based on the order in which they appear in a sentence, and they tend not to have any predictive usage (Cadogan 1319). The same characteristics are usually the case in descriptive genitives as they too are restricted in their positions and when changes the end up making the sentence ungrammatically correct. An example is “an excessively short week’s two notice.” Furthermore, the genitive in the sentence as direct modifiers lacks any predicative usage.

As a result, syntactic status in the sentence is an adjective. Furthermore, denominal adjectives as for the case of the descriptive genitive “week’s” tend to be formed by adding agentive marker -‘s- to is as a suffix. Lastly, the term “week’s” in the sentence has a base noun “week” derived from its referentiality with regards to the anaphoric island constraint. As a result, the genitive used in the sentence is not as a determinant instead as a denominal adjective.

Works Cited
Cadogan, Dawn. “Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts.” The Charleston Advisor 14.4 (2013): 1319.