Problems With The Structural Elements Of A Genitive Cluster

 Fawcett (2010: 212):

The two most frequent elements of a genitive cluster are the possessor (po) and the genitive element (g). The possessor is typically filled by a nominal group (and occasionally by two or more co-ordinated nominal groups), and the possessor [genitive element] is always and only filled by the morpheme 's (or, after certain word endings, just an apostrophe, as in the Jones' dog).

Thus this cluster has the unusual characteristic that one of its two main elements is typically filled by a group and the other is always expounded by a morpheme.

 

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, this instance of Fawcett's genitive cluster is structured as follows:

One problem here is that an apostrophe is graphological form, not grammatical form, and does not apply to language in spoken mode. A second problem is that 'genitive' is not a function. A third problem is that the possessor is not related to a 'possessed' within this structure, but to an element (Head/Thing) of another structure (nominal group). This is a problem because, in SFL Theory, a structure is the relation between elements. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 451):

Note that, although it is the functions that are labelled, the structure actually consists of the relationships among them.

In contrast, in SFL Theory, unknown to Fawcett, this genitive cluster is a rank-shifted nominal group serving as the Deictic of another nominal group:

It is clear that one reason why Fawcett proposed the notion of a genitive cluster is because he could not fathom how to analyse such forms using SFL Theory.

[2] To be clear, this "unusual characteristic" might be more accurately described as a theoretical inconsistency.