Emerging variation: determiner genitives and noun modifiers in English

Abstract

This article discusses the emerging variation between determiner genitives and noun modifiers in Present-day English. Based on the results of corpus analyses and previous studies I show that this variation (1) was not present in earlier English, and (2) results from the fact that determiner genitives have come to be used with nouns low in animacy while noun modifiers have come to be used with nouns high in animacy (mainly) in the course of Modern English. This semantic shift (or rather 'convergence') of genitives and noun modifiers has helped to create contexts which are compatible with both determiner and classifier function, i.e. the functions typically expressed by determiner genitives and noun modifiers, respectively. The article complements earlier work on the gradience between s-genitive constructions and noun+noun constructions (Rosenbach, 2006a), providing further evidence for the claim that semantic overlap may give rise to constructional gradience.

Grammatical change in the noun phrase: the influence of written language use

“…London newspapers versus television screen; see Huddleston & Pullum et al 2002: 449, Rosenbach 2007. Rosenbach (2007) further distinguishes between 'classifier' versus 'determiner' functions for premodifying nouns that are complements. While it is possible to cite clear-cut examples for these distinctions, many natural occurrences of NN sequences are intermediate and difficult to classify.…”

Animacy and grammatical variation—Findings from English genitive variation

“…In early Modern English s-genitives were still basically restricted to animate nouns (Rosenbach and Vezzosi, 2000), it is only in the course of Modern English that the s-genitive also spreads to inanimate nouns (cf. Rosenbach, 2002Rosenbach, , 2007a. In the early Modern English period we can already find a few 'outliers', i.e.…”

“…Recently, however, Rosenbach (2007a) has shown that this variation is also strongly determined by animacy in that human dependents prefer the s-genitive while inanimate dependents are preferably realized as noun modifiers. That is, Mair's dinner party is more likely than the Mair dinner party, and the hotel lobby is more frequent than the hotel's lobby.…”

“…15 More specifically, Rosenbach (2007a) argues that animacy (together with referentiality; see also section 6) determines the prototypicality of determiner s-genitives vis-à-vis noun modifiers. Typically, determiner s-genitives have an animate and a referential (in the sense of specific) possessor, while noun modifiers are preferably inanimate and non-referential; it is in these contexts that the two constructions are most frequent.…”

“…Typically, determiner s-genitives have an animate and a referential (in the sense of specific) possessor, while noun modifiers are preferably inanimate and non-referential; it is in these contexts that the two constructions are most frequent. As argued by Rosenbach (2007a), any divergence from the typical animacy values of s-genitives and noun modifiers leads to 'semantic hybrids' which share properties of both nominal determination (or possession proper) and classification. As such they may come to alternate with the respective prototypical construction; see the illustration in Fig.…”