English possessive
The ( Anglo - ) Saxon genitive denotes a grammatical phenomenon in general, or anglistischen linguistics, namely a genitive construction in which the dependent part precedes the ruling head (such as her happiness blacksmith, Hauff's Fairy Tales ). In English it is called " Apostrophic genitive " (eg, Fisherman's Friend, Peter's mother's lover's son).
Term
The term comes from the English literature. In English, there are mainly two ways to form a dependency relationship between two nominal phrases using a genitive, on the one hand, the variant with genitive -s, and on the other hand, the variant of using:
While the latter variant was borrowed under the influence of the Romance languages into English, it is assumed that this is an Anglo-Saxon relic in the genitive -s variant. Therefore, it has naturalized Saxon genitive genitive for this variant with the term s ( Anglo - ).
In many German-speaking non-scientific publications, the term of the Saxon genitive is restricted to the partially erroneous in the German spelling of this grammatical construction with apostrophe.
Linguistic peculiarities
It is characteristic of the Saxon genitive, that the entire construction is always interpreted definite: in the expression Peters Auto / Peter 's car is a very specific car ( ie the only car that Peter belongs in the particular situation ) meant. The reading of Any Gender Peters cars is not possible here. For other variants, however, definite and indefinite genitive genitive would be possible. To distinguish an article for the overall construction is, unlike in the Saxon genitive necessary.
- The car Peters / Peters a car
- The designer of a car / a designer of cars
In the English language, the Saxon Gentitiv is morphophonologisch by a Klitikum " s " indicates that the right to the entire ruled phrase appending ( phrase boundaries in the example are marked by square brackets ) is:
In the last example, the meaning is not clear if the phrase boundaries are not known: The policeman who had hit the car of the demonstrators would be a grammatically possible interpretation.
Orthography
In the English language, the Saxon genitive is written by a apostrophiertes s at the end of the governed phrase:
In German, the spelling with an apostrophe in the 19th century was still the predominant form. The Duden they disapproved initially only: If genitives it was " not necessary " to put an apostrophe. However, this was abolished in the reform of German orthography from 1901 - the spelling of the Anglo-Saxon genitive apostrophe was thus generally be regarded as wrong. However, this was not fully reflected in the everyday language (written); even in the 1920s the primed notation was the popular choice of many companies ( Meier 's world travels, Hütter 's new world of living, etc., see also Beck's, Brehm 's), which renamed afterwards. This use of the apostrophe is sometimes pejoratively, sometimes jokingly referred to as Apostrophitis. Since the spelling reform of 1996, it is then permissible if it serves to clearly delineate the genitive ending of proper names, of which there is a version without and one with -s ( Andrea B. operates Andrea's Flowers Corner, Andreas C. operates Andreas ' tool box ).