Feature percolation in the Dutch possessive
Jack Hoeksema · Linguistik aktuell · 2010
In this squib, I discuss the Dutch possessive construction. I will show that it is fully recursive, but in a very restricted way: it may only have a complex left branch, if the left branch of that left branch is marked as possessive as well. To quote Ross (1967): it’s turtles all the way down. This leads to a lefmost path in the tree that shows connectivity in the graph-theoretical sense: if a node A is marked as [poss] and another node B is likewise marked as [poss], then any nodes in a path from A to B are also marked as [poss]. Such a state of affairs may be described in terms of path conditions (Koster 1978, 1986, Kayne 1981, inter alii), or feature percolation (Gazdar 1982).