This special issue concerns English genitive variation: the choice between the s-genitive and the of-genitive. It has grown out of the workshop ‘Genitive variation in English’, which was held at the conference of the International Society for the Linguistics of English at the University of Boston in June 2011. While previous research on genitive variation has already unearthed a wealth of factors predicting the variation, the aim of this volume is to add new dimensions to existing parameters.

Research on the English genitive (e.g. Rosenbach 2007: 154) reports increasing use of the s-variant. This has been explained as extension to inanimate possessors, a semantic shift (e.g. Hundt 1998; Rosenbach 2002), or due to the pressures of economy in journalism, a register change (Hinrichs & Szmrecsanyi 2007; Szmrecsanyi & Hinrichs 2008). The present work reports on a large-scale sociolinguistic investigation of the genitive in vernacular Canadian English using socially stratified corpora and individuals of all ages. The results show that human, prototypical possessors are 96 per cent s-genitive and non-humans are 95 per cent of-genitive. Within the small envelope where both forms are possible, we discover that variation patterns quite differently depending on animacy. For humans, use of the s-genitive is stable in apparent time and correlates with whether or not the possessor ends in a sibilant. In contrast, non-human collectives/organizations reveal an increasing use of s-genitives in apparent time and a favouring effect of short possessors, persistence (when an s-genitive has occurred recently in the previous discourse) and when the individual has a blue-collar job. Groups comprising humans (collectives and organizations), such as our church's youth group, and places that are possible locations for humans (countries, cities, etc.), as in Toronto's best restaurant, are the prime conduit for this change. These findings from vernacular speech confirm the extension of the s-genitive in inanimates by semantic extension.

This article is a survey of quantitative research on the choice between the s-genitive and the of-genitive in English. It provides a detailed and critical review of the methodological problems and advances as well as major findings and how these have been treated in theoretical frameworks. The article concludes with a discussion of objectives and challenges for future research. It is argued that research into English genitive variation not only enhances our knowledge of this specific case of syntactic variation but also helps us to further understand the mechanisms of syntactic alternations in general.

Human behaviour, like everything else, has causes. Most of the time, those causes can be described as reasons. Human beings perform actions because they have reasons for performing them. They are capable of surveying the options available and then selecting one based upon those reasons. But invariably occasions arise in which the reasons known to the agent fail to single out a determinate option. When reasons cannot determine the option to select on their own, the agent must resort to some form of non-reasoned decision-making (NRDM). This paper distinguishes four different forms of NRDM – picking, randomizing, deferring and judging. Each form may be appropriate under different circumstances. The paper concludes by laying out the theoretical assumptions upon which this account of NRDM rests.

A series of studies in experimental philosophy have revealed that people blame others for foreseen negative side effects but do not praise them for foreseen positive ones. In order to challenge this idea, also called the Knobe effect, we develop a laboratory experiment using monetary incentives. In a game-theoretic framework we formalize the two vignettes in a neutral way, which means that we abstain from the use of any specific language terms and can easily control and vary the economic parameters of the situation. We confirm the Knobe effect in one situation and present situations in which the effect vanishes or even reverses. Our results are in line with a theoretical approach where the assessment of intention is not based on the action itself but on the underlying motive – as modelled in Levine (1998).

Poverty indexes are essential for monitoring poverty, setting targets for poverty reduction, and tracking progress on these goals. This paper suggests that further justification is necessary for using the main poverty indexes in the literature in any of these ways. It does so by arguing that poverty should not decline with the mere addition of a rich person to a population and showing that the standard indexes do not satisfy this axiom. It, then, suggests a way of modifying these indexes to avoid this problem.