Linguistic Typology and the Demise of Morphological Case: The Development of the Genitive in the Germanic Languages

This project will investigate how changes to the case marking systems of the Germanic languages affected the expression of the relationships originally encoded by genitive case. New data will be gathered concerning changes in Dutch and English. The investigation will then be extended to the other Germanic languages. A primary aim of the project is to present a case study of how closely related languages can diverge significantly while undergoing a similar shift from one overall type to another, adding to our understanding of what sort of changes the human language capability allows in the transmission of language across generations.