What controls the “genitive variation” in Present-Day English?

Abstract

This paper takes up the recent discussion of what controls speakers' use of the -5 and of-genitives, as in the university's budget and the budget of the university. Most of the paper deals directly with control ofthat "genitive variation". It first argues that there is a third variant, as in the university budget. It then discusses why all three just given, for example, are grammatical, but, with a litre of petrol, the alternatives {*apetrol's litre and '^a petrol litre) are not grammatical, arguing that the grammaticality is controlled by whether the word and phrase meanings are compatible with their syntax. It then argues that, where there are equally grammatical alternatives, the speakers" choice often depends on the same issues of semantic and syntactic compatibility. The last main section of the paper deals with the grammatical status ofthat third variant, arguing that the ¡ budget truly is genitive.

On the (non-)equivalence of constructions with determiner genitives and noun modifiers in English

“…As pointed out by Szmrecsanyi et al (2016: 25), a serious complication of widening genitive variation beyond the usual binary alternation of determiner genitives and of -genitives is the fact that there are potentially other variants that can intersect with s -genitives, of -genitives and noun modifiers (cf. also Feist 2012: 292–3), such as other prepositional phrases For example, should the alternation of the FBI's director vs the FBI director vs the director of the FBI also include the director from the FBI ? And what about adjectival variants, namely the alternation between Halliday's framework , the framework of Halliday , the Halliday framework and the Hallidayan framework ?…”

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

“…Notice though that in coding for final sibilancy, we did not distinguish between plural markers and final sibilants in the root of a possessor head noun. Thus, the final sibilancy effect is probably a plurality effect—premodifier nouns do not normally have plural inflection (Feist, 2012:269).…”

“…2.We follow Feist (2012:293) in considering the NN-genitive a true genitive. What we call “NN-genitives” are also known as “noun + noun sequences” (Rosenbach, 2006), or “noun + noun constructions” (Rosenbach, 2007a) in the literature.…”

“…Rather, most researchers have tended to ignore the NN-genitive, simplistically restricting attention to the binary variation between the s-genitive and the ofgenitive. Studies that actually acknowledge the existence of the NN-genitive (Feist, 2012;Rosenbach, 2006Rosenbach, , 2007aRosenbach, , 2007b or discuss NN constructions as alternatives to of-genitives (Biber & Gray 2011, 2013, 2016 tended to eschew a quantitative-variationist perspective. Our theoretical/descriptive objective here is to redress this negligence: how does the choice between the NN-genitive and either the s-genitive or the of-genitive differ from the well-known alternation between the s-genitive and the of-genitive?…”

English genitive variation – the state of the art

“…See alsoLeech et al (2009: §10) for corpus evidence for the observation that of-genitives have been increasingly replaced by s-genitive and noun modifiers in the course of the twentieth century, at least in press language. That is, expressions like the fruit of the coconut palm are getting increasingly realized as either the coconut palm's fruit or (the) coconut palm fruit.6 However, see recentlyFeist (2012) for the argument that noun modifiers constitute another variant in genitive variation, on a par with s-genitives and of-genitives. While this is a legitimate claim, it is not clear how we should operationalize it.…”