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Toward more accountability: Modeling ternary genitive variation in Late Modern English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 February 2016

Benedikt Szmrecsanyi ,
Douglas Biber ,
Jesse Egbert  and
Karlien Franco
Benedikt Szmrecsanyi
Affiliation:
KU Leuven
Douglas Biber
Affiliation:
Northern Arizona University
Jesse Egbert
Affiliation:
Brigham Young University
Karlien Franco
Affiliation:
KU Leuven
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Abstract

Whereas the alternation between the s-genitive (the New Year's message) and the of-genitive (the message of the New Year) is well documented, our study offers a more accountable analysis of genitive variation by including noun-noun (NN)-genitives (the New Year message). We consider four different variable contexts (s versus of, NN versus of, NN versus s, and NN versus s versus of ), which we analyze using regression analysis. The dataset consists of 10,054 variable genitives drawn from the Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers. The material covers the period between 1650 and 2000, thus enabling us to track the evolution of variable genitive grammar in real time. We report that there is an overall drift toward the NN-genitive, which is preferred over other variants when constituent noun phrases are short, possessor constituents are inanimate, and possessum constituents are thematic. In addition to these substantive contributions, we showcase methods of dealing with a complex dataset covering nonbinary grammatical variation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , March 2016 , pp. 1 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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