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In New High German, possessive pronouns share properties with pronouns (binding properties), determiners (complementary distribution with articles) and adjectives (cooccurrence with demonstratives). Depending on the properties they stress most, grammars analyse possessive pronouns as pronouns (Erben 1972), determiners (Eisenberg 1986) or adjectives (Blatz 1896). Debates with respect to the categorial status of possessive pronouns also characterize proposals under the Principles and Parameters framework (cf. Haider 1992, Loebel 1996, Olsen 1996). Rather than to argue with Plank (1992) against a discrete conception of syntactic functions, I propose in this paper to classify possessive pronouns as determiners in New High German, taking into account the particular diachronic development of possessive pronouns in the history of German.
The different analyses of possessive pronouns correspond to historical stages of their historical development: (i) Possessive pronouns evolve from genitive forms of personal and reflexive pronouns; (ii) in Old High German and Middle High German, possessive pronouns behave like adjectival modifiers insofar as they cooccur with definite and indefinite articles. It is (iii) only during the course of Early New High German, that they acquire the feature of definiteness. Synchronically, we distinguish languages where possessive pronouns have adjective status, such as Italian, Basque and Russian, and languages where possessive pronouns have determiner status like German, English and French (Lyons 1986, Giorgi & Longobardi 1991).
To account for this diachronic and synchronic variation, I suggest to analyze possessive pronouns in New High German (as well as in English and French) as originating under the functional head D, whereas possessive pronouns in older stages of German are adjectival modifiers as are possessive pronouns in languages like Italian, Basque and Russian. Though the categorial change of possessive pronouns in the history of the German language follows a classic path of grammaticalization, I consider this change to be an epiphenomenon of changes affecting the determiner system in Early New High German, i.e. changes involving the grammatical features associated with the functional category D. Further changes in Early New High German concerning genitive modifiers (word order, definiteness) and concord in noun phrases are likewise surface effects of a syntactic change at a more abstract level of structure.
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