# synchronic and historical causes of the incompatibility of possessive determiners and restrictive post-modifiers



## Sibutlasi

In certain Western European languages (e.g., standard English, Spanish, and, as far as I can tell, also standard German and French, at least) there is an ill-understood constraint that prevents ‘possessive determiners’ (“my”, “mi”, “mein”, “mon”… plus ‘Saxon genitives’, in the case of English and German) from co-occurring with *restrictive* *post*-modifiers (e.g., relative clauses, participial clauses, PP’s, or non-trivial AP’s), cf. English (1) or Spanish (2):



*(What became of) *my* *umbrella that you borrowed*?
*¿(Qué fue de) *mi* paraguas *que te llevaste prestado*?

Interestingly, no such restriction holds between ‘possessive determiners’ and 'complements' of the noun (cf. "My decision to resign", "My arrival at Heathrow airport", "Mi decisión de renunciar", "Mi llegada al aeropuerto de Heathrow") nor between 'possessive determiners' and *other* restrictive modifiers (typically: restrictive AP’s or NP’s - before or after the noun, depending on the language), cf. English (3) or Spanish (4):



(Where is) *my black and beige* *silk* umbrella?
¿(Dónde está) *mi* paraguas *de seda* *negro y beis*?

nor between modifiers, in general, and non-‘possessive’ ‘determiners’, cf. (5) or (6):



*The/that* *black and beige* *silk* umbrella *that you borrowed* (was rather expensive).
 *El* paraguas *de seda negro y beis que te llevaste prestado* (era bastante caro).

nor between modifiers and ‘possessives’ that do *not* function as ‘determiners’, cf. (7) or (8):



(What became of) *the/that* *black and beige silk* umbrella *of mine/my daughter’s* *that you borrowed*?
(¿Qué fue d*el*/de *aquel* paraguas *de seda* *negro y beis* *mío/de mi hija* *que te llevaste prestado*?

Although twenty years ago I myself, building upon Steven Abney’s influential theory of the structure of determiners and upon certain arguable constituent-structure differences between pre- and post-modifiers, managed to develop, and publish, what seemed to be the first (and, at the time, the only) explanation of that mysterious restriction, I have always felt that that paper of mine was rather a ‘tour de force’, and I still suspect that my would-be explanation could well be partial or, at least, too parochial. [My empirical basis, after all, was limited to facts collected from just a few Western European languages; I knew nothing about modern Eastern Indo-European, not to mention non-Indoeuropean, languages].

Just to give you an idea of what that explanation was like, in essence, my claim was that English (or German) ‘(Saxon) genitive’ and ‘possessive determiners’, as well as Spanish (or French, etc.) ‘possessive determiners’ being ‘specifiers’ of the head D (= determiner) at the front of the ‘noun phrase’ could ‘c-command’ and so ‘take scope’ over restrictive pre-modifiers and ‘low’ post-nominal PP’s, AP's or clauses (= PP or CP complements, or AP modifiers, of the noun) and ‘license’ them, but could *not* take scope over PP or clausal post-modifiers, which, I argued, had to be attached ‘higher’, and to the DP itself, rather than to the NP. With some technical tinkering, everything seemed to fit well enough, but, as I said, I have always felt as if I was missing something (semantic, perhaps?) much more basic. 

Could anybody here suggest reasons, synchronic or historical, why such a strange restriction should exist in English and Spanish, among other languages?

Thank you in advance.

S.


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## Peterdg

S.,

What are:

1) PP
2) AP
3) CP
4) DP
5) NP
6) non-trivial AP's

I don't understand either what the role of the Saxon genitive is in this story.

But more importantly: I don't see anything wrong in "What became of my umbrella that you borrowed?". And I wouldn't see anything wrong in "Wat is er met mijn paraplu gebeurd die je geleend hebt?"  in Dutch or "Qu'est-ce qu'il s'est passé avec mon parapluie que tu as prêté?" in French. Or am I missing something here?"


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## donbill

I see nothing wrong with "What became of my umbrella that you borrowed?". The possessive adjectives and the definite article(s) usually have the same combinatory potential in both Spanish and English, so "What became of the umbrella that you borrowed?" and "What became of my umbrella that you borrowed?" both seem perfectly acceptable to me.

I am not a native speaker of Spanish, so I won't comment on "¿Qué fue de mi paraguas que te llevaste prestado?" other than to say that it doesn't seem ungrammatical to me. I'll leave it to the natives to comment further if they so desire.


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## SevenDays

What comes to mind is the notion, at least in some grammars, that possessive determiners function as _restrictive modifiers_ when they are stressed, as would be in _where is *MY* umbrella?_ Expanding the question to say _where is my umbrella that you borrowed?_ becomes problematic because we'd be adding a _second restrictive modifier_ (in this case, a that-clause functioning as adjective) when the noun "umbrella" already has one ("my"). _My decision to resign_ doesn't have this restriction because "to resign" is a _complement_ rather than a _modifier_. Simply put, as complement, "to resign" is necessary to complete the meaning of "decision;" it can't be left out. In other words, "decision" _licenses_ the complement "to resign." By contrast, "that you borrowed" is not a complement because I could say _where's my umbrella?_ to convey full meaning. I don't want to suggest that all this is some sort of universal rule, but it might shed some light into this. On the other hand, whatever the reason, any theory that questions the structure of "what became of my umbrella that you borrowed? runs into a problem: that for some speakers, the sentence is perfectly fine, as donbill shows. (By the way, I think S. is using shorthand, where, unless I'm mistaken, PP means prepositional phrase, CP = complement phrase, DP = determinative phrase, NP = noun phrase, and AP might mean adjective phrase, adverb phrase, or even appositive phrase.)  
Cheers


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## donbill

Thanks, SevenDays, for a very helpful response.

It seems to me that you could say something like,"Where's MY umbrella that you borrowed, not HER UMBRELLA that you usually borrow?" or "I'm talking about MY umbrella that you borrowed, not HER UMBRELLA that you borrowed last week" and, thus, bypass the second restrictive modifier that you mention in your post. I don't know why I think that's possible. It is not based on any authoritative proof. 

It's an interesting and very complicated point!


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## Dan2

It's a subtle judgment, but I agree with Sibutlasi that there's something wrong with "Where is my umbrella that you borrowed", while if you replace "my" with "the", or delete the _that_-clause, the sentence is perfect.

I'm not in a position to discuss this from a technical point of view, but including both "my" and "that you borrowed" seems like too much specification (even tho _logically _there is nothing wrong with it: it is certainly possible to say, "I would like to ask about one of my umbrellas, an umbrella that you borrowed ...").  My "feeling" ("too much specification") about the problem with the sentence seems similar to SevenDays' more technical description, "Expanding the question to say _where is my umbrella that you borrowed?_ becomes problematic because we'd be adding a _second restrictive modifier"._


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## Gabriel

It looks to me that adding "the one" before the "that" resolves everything?

Where is my umbrella, the one that you borrowed?


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## S.V.

«[...] _atantas vezes muriendo que la mi vida que atiendo ya la maldigo llorando_» (1400-1500, Anónimo).​ «[...] _es necessario que los ayos_ [...] _sean hombres muy verdaderos, no sólo en sus palabras que hablan_ [...]» (Guevara, Fray Antonio de _Reloj de Príncipes_ [Esp. 1529 - 1531]).​
My _guess_ would be that we wouldn't say "_¿Qué fue de mi_[_o_]_ paraguas que tú te llevaste?_" for the same reason we don't say "_¿Qué fue de paraguas mío que tú te llevaste?_". The article would be needed in both sentences, but it is now obsolete in the first case. The question would be why it didn't take over its function, like in the second example.


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## SevenDays

Gabriel said:


> It looks to me that adding "the one" before the "that" resolves everything?
> 
> Where is my umbrella, the one that you borrowed?



Yes, that works; you've introduced a comma, which creates a second syntactic structure, so that now "that you borrowed" functions as a complement of "the one" rather than as a modifier of "my umbrella."


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## Sibutlasi

Peterdg said:


> S.,
> 
> What are:
> 
> 1) PP
> 2) AP
> 3) CP
> 4) DP
> 5) NP
> 6) non-trivial AP's
> 
> I don't understand either what the role of the Saxon genitive is in this story.
> 
> But more importantly: I don't see anything wrong in "What became of my umbrella that you borrowed?". And I wouldn't see anything wrong in "Wat is er met mijn paraplu gebeurd die je geleend hebt?"  in Dutch or "Qu'est-ce qu'il s'est passé avec mon parapluie que tu as prêté?" in French. Or am I missing something here?"



Peterdg,

‘PP’, ‘AP’, and ‘NP’ (as well as ‘VP’, ‘AdvP’, etc.) are absolutely standard abbreviations for ‘preposition(al)/adjective(al)/noun (nominal) phrase’ (also, ‘VP’ = ‘verb phrase’, ‘AdvP’= ‘adverb(ial) phrase, etc.). ‘CP’ is also a widely used (although, admittedly, not as universally agreed upon) abbreviation for ‘clause’ (since ‘clauses’ are also ‘phrases’, under the traditional view that any combination of ‘words’ is a ‘phrase’). As to ‘DP’, it is a standard abbreviation for ‘determiner phrase’, a phrase headed by a 'determiner' (a general term of convenience for ‘articles’, ‘demonstratives’, ‘possessives’, 'Saxon genitives', certain 'strong' ‘quantifiers’ like "some" or "any", and certain interrogative adjectives like "which" or "what") that takes an 'NP' complement that cannot by itself play any of the 'nominal' functions (subject, object, etc.) proper nouns - the archetypal 'nouns' - typically play (cf. “*Umbrella that you borrowed was quite expensive”, “*Please return umbrella that you borrowed”). Finally, "a non-trivial AP" is an adjectival phrase that contains its own internal complement(s) or modifier(s), such as "keen on jazz" or "familiar with jazz piano techniques" (complements), or "keen on music since he was a child" (a complement and a modifier), and it is "non-trivial" in the sense that "trivial" ones contain just adjectives or adjectives preceded by expressions of degree. [The difference is important because in English "trivial" AP's may precede their nouns and are perfectly happy with possessives, whereas such more complex AP's cannot precede their nouns and are not]. Since this is supposed to be a forum about English and Spanish *grammar*, it did not occur to me that any of those abbreviations, even CP and DP, which are newer and not so well established yet, could be opaque to anybody here. My apologies for that error of judgment.

The 'Saxon genitive' (an old term not as commonly used nowadays as it was in Sweet’s or Jespersen’s times, but one I use because many learners of English have surely encountered it in their school grammars) is structurally and semantically equivalent to a 'possessive adjective' and just as uneasy with restrictive relative clauses as a 'possessive adjective' is (cf. "*?My wife's paper that you referred to in your dissertation").

Your Dutch example is not quite relevant for present purposes because its relative clause has been 'extraposed' and clauses in 'extraposition' (like non-restrictive modifiers) are *not* subject to the same restrictions that affect those that remain within their NPs/DPs (which does not mean that I'm not interested in it, but I am much more interested in further Dutch examples you may provide of NPs/DPs with possessives/genitives and *non-extraposed* relative clauses).

Finally, I understand why you do not notice anything 'wrong' with "*?my umbrella that you borrowed", etc. I know that many speakers do not, either, and for a very good reason: since it may well be necessary to express *both* possession *and* a restrictive modifier that helps the hearer identify the referent the speaker has in mind (note that I may have many umbrellas!), such combinations *should* be possible, and that's why I said the constraint was mysterious, but, believe me, many native speakers (and I mean the kind of native speakers who write books and scientific papers about English/Spanish grammar) do find such examples awkward, if not plainly ungrammatical. As a native speaker of Spanish, I can assure you that "*....mi paraguas que me pediste prestado...." is *not* well-formed in Spanish, and that's not an isolated exception; neither is “?*...mi libro al que te refieres en tu tesis...”, etc. We have to say "...el paraguas/libro [mío] que me pediste prestado/al que te refieres en tu tesis....", where "mío" is obviously 'possessive' (in a very broad sense of ‘possession’, a different matter) but does *not* function as a 'determiner' and so does not interfere with the relative clause. This fact, by the way, suggests that there is nothing ‘semantic’ that may 'block' such constructions, and that’s why my attempt at explanation of twenty years ago was based exclusively on syntax.


S.


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## Peterdg

Thanks for your explanation. I think you'd be suprised to know how many people are familiar with your abbreviations. (See Sevendays comments on what *he supposes* the abbreviations mean).

I know what the Saxon genitive is: I just didn't see how it fits in your story here.

About the Dutch example that I gave: it didn't even occur to me that the word order could matter, but just to avoid discussion: "Wat is er gebeurd met mijn paraplu die je geleend hebt?" is, in my opinion, just as correct as the first Dutch example that I gave (and moreover, it means exactly the same as the first example). (I  suppose that is what you mean with "extraposed").


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## Adolfo Afogutu

donbill said:


> I am not a native speaker of Spanish, so I won't comment on "¿Qué fue de mi paraguas que te llevaste prestado?" other than to say that it doesn't seem ungrammatical to me. I'll leave it to the natives to comment further if they so desire.





			
				Gabriel said:
			
		

> It looks to me that adding "the one" before the "that" resolves everything?
> 
> Where is my umbrella, the one that you borrowed?



The same suggestion that you have made would much improve the Spanish sentence too: ¿Qué fue de mi paraguas, el que te llevaste prestado?


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## donbill

Adolfo Afogutu said:


> The same suggestion that you have made would much improve the Spanish sentence too: ¿Qué fue de mi paraguas, el que te llevaste prestado?



It solves the problem by using a pronoun (el que, the one that), and I'll agree it sounds better in both Spanish and English. Nevertheless, I can still see a legitimate use for the "delinquent" construction in English. If more than one umbrella has been mentioned, mine and another, and if both have been borrowed by the same person, I might say "Where's _*my*_ umbrella that you borrowed last week? I don't really care about the other."

I fully understand the idea of the "double restriction," but it just doesn't strike me as incorrect.


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## iribela

Como dijeron antes "¿Qué fue de mi paraguas, el que te llevaste prestado?".
Pero sencillamente alguien diría, ¿Qué fue del paraguas que te presté? 
No es que esté mal enfatizar "mi paraguas", pero se sobrentiende que si lo presté, era mío.


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## aldonzalorenzo

Otra opción: "¿qué pasó con mi paraguas?" o "¿qué pasó con el paraguas que te presté?".


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## Sibutlasi

donbill said:


> I see nothing wrong with "What became of my umbrella that you borrowed?". The possessive adjectives and the definite article(s) usually have the same combinatory potential in both Spanish and English, so "What became of the umbrella that you borrowed?" and "What became of my umbrella that you borrowed?" both seem perfectly acceptable to me.
> 
> I am not a native speaker of Spanish, so I won't comment on "¿Qué fue de mi paraguas que te llevaste prestado?" other than to say that it doesn't seem ungrammatical to me. I'll leave it to the natives to comment further if they so desire.



Thanks for your judgment, which, as I explained in my earlier reply to Peterdg, is logically speaking reasonable and probably shared by many native speakers, but, as I said, there are other highly educated native speakers that do perceive a clear difference in status between those examples. How many do or do not does not matter, at bottom: even if only a small minority of native speakers made that difference, it would still be interesting to know why, particularly as the same phenomenon recurs in several, or perhaps many, languages. 

Your second sentence, in any case, is not quite accurate. Although, in current English, articles, demonstratives, and possessive adjectives exclude each other and apparently alternate in what looks like a unique 'determiner' position at the front of the noun phrase (which is perhaps what you meant by their having "the same combinatory potential"), there is very strong diachronic and cross-linguistic evidence that they do *not* constitute a homogeneous 'determiner' class, nor occupy the same 'slot' in the structure of NPs. On the contrary, they have partly different syntactic and semantic properties, occupy different structural positions, and, in other languages (and, residually, also in English), may co-occur in the same NP. Since this is a forum about English and Spanish grammar only, examples from other languages or dialects may not be appropriate, but, to cite just a relevant fact, in standard Spanish examples like "*La chica* *ésta* es un desastre" = 'the-girl-this-is-a-disaster'), "*Este* hijo *mío* es un caso perdido", or "*El* hijo *mío* *éste* no tiene arreglo" show that a definite article, a demonstrative, and a possessive may co-occur, although only one of them is allowed to reach the Determiner position and those that are not must undergo significant phonological and informational/semantic changes. Even in (present-day) English, where articles and demonstratives do not co-occur, as far as I know, there are a few residual cases in which a demonstrative does still co-occur with a possessive (cf. "In *this your* first day with us, I want to welcome you to the team and wish you ...."), and, of course, at earlier stages, there were many other possibilities. The problem is that the differences that do exist do not, in retrospect, seem to me to yield a non-stipulative explanation of why, if only for certain speakers, articles and demonstratives freely co-occur with restrictive PP's and relative clauses whereas possessives and genitives do not. That's what I would like to know other people's views about.

Cheers!

S.


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## donbill

Thanks, Sibutlasi. Very interesting and a lot of food for thought!


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## SydLexia

I agree that the umbrella sentence sounds strange without context, but I think it works fine in the following dialogue:


A:  What became of my umbrella? 

B: I think you mean, "what became of _my_ umbrella that _you_ borrowed?".


syd


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## Sibutlasi

Peterdg said:


> Thanks for your explanation. I think you'd be suprised to know how many people are familiar with your abbreviations. (See Sevendays comments on what *he supposes* the abbreviations mean).
> 
> I know what the Saxon genitive is: I just didn't see how it fits in your story here.
> 
> About the Dutch example that I gave: it didn't even occur to me that the word order could matter, but just to avoid discussion: "Wat is er gebeurd met mijn paraplu die je geleend hebt?" is, in my opinion, just as correct as the first Dutch example that I gave (and moreover, it means exactly the same as the first example). (I  suppose that is what you mean with "extraposed").



Thank you, Peterdg. That Dutch example is indeed relevant to this discussion (well, I hope our moderators will not object to an occasional example from a language historically related to English, anyway). Only, if you do not notice any awkwardness in "?*my umbrella that you borrowed", you are not likely to notice it in a strictly parallel Dutch example. What is at stake here is not a ripple in the grammar of Spanish, English, etc., but something much deeper, I suspect.

Kind regards

S.


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## Sibutlasi

SevenDays said:


> <...> Expanding the question to say _where is my umbrella that you borrowed?_ becomes problematic because we'd be adding a _second restrictive modifier_ (in this case, a that-clause functioning as adjective) when the noun "umbrella" already has one ("my").<...>
> Cheers



Thanks Sevendays, but adding a second restrictive modifier never causes any problem, as even the examples (3-8) of #1 above show. [Well, somebody has edited my post and now they appear as "1" and "2" three consecutive times, but I hope that does not cause any serious trouble]. If you said that adding a second 'determiner/identifier' would cause trouble, I would absolutely agree: two 'determiners' would cause a 'binding' problem (a variable bound by two different quantifiers), but nothing suggests that the relative clause is a second 'determiner'. On the contrary, many logicians and grammarians have noted the close association that exists between articles and relative clauses/restrictive modifiers, as, in general, between an operator or quantifier [in this case Russell's 'iota' operator] and its associated variable.

S.


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## Sibutlasi

donbill said:


> Thanks, SevenDays, for a very helpful response.
> 
> It seems to me that you could say something like,"Where's MY umbrella that you borrowed, not HER UMBRELLA that you usually borrow?" or "I'm talking about MY umbrella that you borrowed, not HER UMBRELLA that you borrowed last week" and, thus, bypass the second restrictive modifier that you mention in your post. I don't know why I think that's possible. It is not based on any authoritative proof.
> 
> It's an interesting and very complicated point!



Thanks donbill, but emphasis (contrast at the level of information theory/discourse structure) has nothing to do with this issue. We'd better leave that aside here, as it will only introduce additional complications.


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## Sibutlasi

Dan2 said:


> It's a subtle judgment, but I agree with Sibutlasi that there's something wrong with "Where is my umbrella that you borrowed", while if you replace "my" with "the", or delete the _that_-clause, the sentence is perfect.
> 
> I'm not in a position to discuss this from a technical point of view, but including both "my" and "that you borrowed" seems like too much specification (even tho _logically _there is nothing wrong with it: it is certainly possible to say, "I would like to ask about one of my umbrellas, an umbrella that you borrowed ...").  My "feeling" ("too much specification") about the problem with the sentence seems similar to SevenDays' more technical description, "Expanding the question to say _where is my umbrella that you borrowed?_ becomes problematic because we'd be adding a _second restrictive modifier"._



Thanks Dan. Your intuitive judgment is surely correct, but we have to substantiate it, and claiming that a second restrictive modifier is not possible leads nowhere, as I explained in earlier posts.

S.


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## Sibutlasi

Gabriel said:


> It looks to me that adding "the one" before the "that" resolves everything?
> 
> Where is my umbrella, the one that you borrowed?



Thanks Gabriel. It does in the sense that it changes the structure and avoids the problem. Non-restrictive modifiers, including appositive ones like the one you suggest, do not cause any trouble, but of course the explanation for the problem that a particular structure raises can never consist in avoiding the problematic structure and saying something else, !


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## Sibutlasi

S.V. said:


> «[...] _atantas vezes muriendo que la mi vida que atiendo ya la maldigo llorando_» (1400-1500, Anónimo).​ «[...] _es necessario que los ayos_ [...] _sean hombres muy verdaderos, no sólo en sus palabras que hablan_ [...]» (Guevara, Fray Antonio de _Reloj de Príncipes_ [Esp. 1529 - 1531]).​
> My _guess_ would be that we wouldn't say "_¿Qué fue de mi_[_o_]_ paraguas que tú te llevaste?_" for the same reason we don't say "_¿Qué fue de paraguas mío que tú te llevaste?_". The article would be needed in both sentences, but it is now obsolete in the first case. The question would be why it didn't take over its function, like in the second example.



Thanks, S.V. Indeed, at earlier stages of both Spanish and English expressions like "sus palabras que hablan" were possible, and it would be nice to know why. My guess is that, at those stages, "sus" (and English possessives and Saxon genitives) were not yet 'determiners', but 'adjectives' or case-marked NPs in broadly 'adjectival' functions. Nevertheless, without the article "*paraguas mío" is never possible (not since Late Latin, anyway) and "mi" and "mio" cannot be associated as you suggest. Except in dialects like Asturian "el mi + N" is always bad, and has been so for centuries.


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## Sibutlasi

SydLexia said:


> I agree that the umbrella sentence sounds strange without context, but I think it works fine in the following dialogue:
> 
> 
> A: What became of my umbrella?
> 
> B: I think you mean, "what became of _my_ umbrella that _you_ borrowed?".
> 
> 
> syd



Thanks, Sydlexia! . 

In that context your B: sentence (or perhaps "I think you mean, What became of *YOUR* umbrella that *I* borrowed", since the second "you" can only refer to the speaker of B, or the dialogue would lose coherence) sounds perfect to me, but note that the speaker of B has created an 'emphatic' or 'contrastive' juxtaposition (hence the strong stress on "my" and "you") in order to challenge speaker A's claim as the owner of the umbrella and 'correct' it: the owner of the umbrella is speaker B, not A; B is just the cheeky borrower. Citation has the immediate effect of changing 'use' into 'mention' ('metalinguistic' function), and additional rules apply to the mechanisms that compute meaning/reference in metalinguistic contexts. As it is quite likely that whatever makes 'possessive/genitive' + restrictive relative clauses (and other postmodifiers) 'awkward' has to do with 'reference' (recall that the determiner is an 'identifier' that works in tandem with one or more restrictors), it is better not to complicate the issue further. 

Cheers

S.


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