Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T19:35:59.517Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Variation in English genitives across modality and genres1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2014

JASON GRAFMILLER
JASON GRAFMILLER*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, KU Leuven, Blijde-Inkomsstraat 21, B-3000, Leuven, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The choice of genitive construction in English is conditioned by numerous semantic, syntactic and phonological factors. The present study explores the influence of these factors across different modalities (speech vs writing) and genres (e.g. press, fiction, etc.), and models the mediating effect of language-external variables on internal cognitive and linguistic factors within the context of a probabilistic grammar of genitive choice. The discussion revolves around debates concerning the driving force(s) behind recent changes in newspaper genitives, concluding that the trend reflects a push toward more economical modes of expression in reportage texts. Curiously, analysis finds few significant interactions with low-level processing-related factors, e.g. possessor frequency and lexical density – a surprising result in light of recent research. However, analysis further reveals significant inter-genre variability among several other crucial factors including possessor animacy and final sibilancy, which are significantly reduced in journalistic prose. These latter findings offer indirect evidence in favor of economization, and offer insight into the connections between external stylistic concerns, specific linguistic practices and internal probabilistic weights associated with specific grammatical constructions.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , November 2014 , pp. 471 - 496
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

Thanks to Stephanie Shih and Joan Bresnan for discussion and assistance with data annotation. Thanks also to Richard Futrell for assistance with the collection and coding of the Switchboard corpus data. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and feedback. This material is based in part upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. BCS-1025602 to Stanford University for the research project ‘Development of syntactic alternations’ (PI Joan Bresnan). The usual disclaimers apply.

References

Altenberg, B. 1982. The genitive v. the of-construction: A study of syntactic variation in 17th Century English. Malmö: CWK Gleerup.Google Scholar
Anschutz, Arlea. 1997. How to choose a possessive noun phrase construction in four easy steps. Studies in Language 21, 1–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baayen, Harald. 2008. Analyzing linguistic data. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baayen, R. H., Davidson, D. J. & Bates, D. M.. 2008. Mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects for subjects and items. Journal of Memory and Language 59, 390–412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas. 1988. Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas. 1995. Dimensions of register variation: A cross-linguistic comparison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas. 2003. Compressed noun-phrase structures in newspaper discourse. In Aitchison, J. & Lewis, D. M. (eds.), New media language, 169–81. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas & Finegan, Edward. 1989. Drift and the evolution of English style: A history of three genres. Language 65 (3), 487–517.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan, & Finegan, Edward. 1999. Longman grammar of spoken and written English. Harlow: Longman.Google Scholar
Bresnan, Joan, Cueni, Anna, Nikitina, Tatiana & Harald, Baayen. 2007. Predicting the dative alternation. In Boume, G., Kraemer, I. & Zwarts, J. (eds.), Cognitive foundations of interpretation, 69–94. Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Science.Google Scholar
Bresnan, Joan & Ford, Marilyn. 2010. Predicting syntax: Processing dative constructions in American and Australian varieties of English. Language 86 (1), 168–213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ehret, Katharina. 2011. The role of rhythm as a factor in historical genitive variability. Masters thesis. University of Freiburg.Google Scholar
Garretson, Gregory, O’Connor, M. Catherine, Skarabela, Barbora & Hogan, Marjorie. 2004. Coding practices used in the project Optimality Typology of Determiner Phrases. http://npcorpus.edu/documentation/index.html.Google Scholar
Geeraerts, Dirk, Kristiansen, Gitte & Peirsman, Yves. 2010. Introduction. Advances in cognitive sociolinguistics. In Geeraerts, Dirk, Kristiansen, Gitte & Peirsman, Yves (eds.), Advances in cognitive sociolinguistics, 1–19. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gelman, Andrew. 2008. Scaling regression inputs by dividing by two standard deviations. Statistics in Medicine 27 (15), 2865–73.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gelman, Andrew & Hill, Jennifer. 2007. Data analysis using regression and multilevel/hierarchical models. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Godfrey, John J., Holliman, Edward C. & McDaniel, Jane. 1992. SWITCHBOARD: Telephone speech corpus for research and development. Proceedings of ICASSP-92, 517–20.Google Scholar
Grafmiller, Jason & Shih, Stephanie. 2011. New approaches to end weight. Variation and Typology: New Trends in Syntactic Research. Helsinki, Finland, 26.Aug.Google Scholar
Harrell, Frank. 2001. Regression modeling strategies. New York: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hawkins, John A. 1994. A performance theory of order and constituency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hinrichs, Lars & Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. 2007. Recent changes in the function and frequency of standard English genitive constructions: A multivariate analysis of tagged corpora. English Language and Linguistics 11 (3), 437–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney & Pullum, Geoffrey K.et al. 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hundt, Marianne & Mair, Christian. 1999. ‘Agile’ and ‘uptight’ genres: The corpus-based approach to language change in progress. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 4, 221–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jucker, Andreas. 1993. The genitive versus the of-construction in newspaper language. In Jucker, Andreas (ed.), The noun phrase in English: Its structure and variability, 121–36. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.Google Scholar
Kaye, Alan S. 2004. On the bare genitive. English Today 20 (3), 57–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kreyer, Rolf. 2003. Genitive and of-construction in modern English. Processability and human involvement. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8, 169–207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey & Smith, Nicholas. 2006. Recent grammatical change in English 1961–1992: Some preliminary findings of a comparison of American with British English. In Renouf, Antoinette & Kehoe, Andrew (eds.), The changing face of corpus linguistics, 185–204. Amsterdam: Rodopi.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marcus, Mitchell P., Marcinkiewicz, Mary Ann & Santorini, Beatrice. 1993. Building a large annotated corpus of English: The Penn Treebank. Computational Linguistics 19, 313–30.Google Scholar
Murphy, Raymond. 1997. English grammar in use with answers: A self-study reference and practice book for intermediate students of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
O’Connor, M. Catherine, Maling, Joan, Anttila, Arto, Fong, Vivienne, Garretson, Gregory, Skarabela, Barbora, Hogan, Marjorie & Karlsson, Fred. 2006. Boston University Noun Phrase Corpus. http://npcorpus.bu.edu.Google Scholar
Osselton, Noel E. 1988. Thematic genitives. In Nixon, Graham & Honey, John (eds.), An historic tongue: Studies in English linguistics in memory of Barbara Strang. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Payne, John & Berlage, Eva. 2011. The effect of semantic relations on genitive variation. International Society for the Linguistics of English 2. Boston 17–21 June.Google Scholar
Pinheiro, José C. & Bates, Douglas M.. 2000. Mixed effects models in S and S-PLUS. New York: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quinion, Michael. November 12, 2005. Double possessive. World Wide Words. Retrieved 9 February 2010. From www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa -dou3.htm.Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London and New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Rosenbach, Anette. 2002. Genitive variation in English: Conceptual factors in synchronic and diachronic studies. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenbach, Anette. 2003. Aspects of iconicity and economy in the choice between the s-genitive and the of-genitive in English. In Rohdenburg, Günter & Mondorf, Britta (eds.), Determinants of grammatical variation in English, 379–412. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenbach, Anette. 2005. Animacy versus weight as determinants of grammatical variation in English. Language 81 (3). 613–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenbach, Anette. 2006. Descriptive genitives in English: A case study on constructional gradience. English Language and Linguistics 10 (1), 77–118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenbach, Anette. 2008. Animacy and grammatical variation: Findings from English genitive variation. Lingua 118, 151–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schlüter, Julia. 2005. Rhythmic grammar: The influence of rhythm on grammatical variation and change in English. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shih, Stephanie, Grafmiller, Jason, Futrell, Richard & Bresnan, Joan. Forthcoming. Rhythm's role in genitive and dative construction choice in spoken English. In Vogel, Ralf & van der Vijver, Rubem (eds.), Rhythm in phonetics, grammar, and cognition. Berlin: De GruyterGoogle Scholar
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. 2006. Morphosyntactic persistence in spoken English: A corpus study at the intersection of variationist sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and discourse analysis. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. 2010. The English genitive alternation in a cognitive sociolinguistics perspective. In Geeraerts, Dirk, Kristiansen, Greta & Peirsman, Yves (eds.), Advances in cognitive sociolinguistics, 141–66. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. 2013. The great regression: Genitive variability in Late Modern English news texts. In Börjars, Kersti, Denison, David & Scott, Alan (eds.), Morphosyntactic categories and the expression of possession, 59–89. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt & Hinrichs, Lars. 2008. Probabilistic determinants of genitive variation in spoken and written English: A multivariate comparison across time, space, and genres. In Nevalainen, Terttu, Taavitsainen, Irma, Pahta, Päivi & Korhonen, Minna, (eds.), The dynamics of linguistic variation: Corpus evidence on English past and present, 291–309. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali & Jarmasz, Lidia. 2008. Variation and change in the English genitive: A sociolinguistic perspective. Paper presented at the 82nd annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Chicago, 4 January.Google Scholar
Taylor, John R. 1989. Possessive genitives in English. Linguistics 27, 663–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, John R. 1996. Possessives in English. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wasow, Thomas. 2002. Postverbal behavior. Stanford: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Weiner, E. Judith & Labov, William. 1983. Constraints on the agentless passive. Journal of Linguistics 19 (1), 29–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolk, Christoph, Bresnan, Joan, Rosenbach, Anette & Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. 2013. Dative and genitive variability in Late Modern English: Exploring cross-constructional variation and change. Diachronica 30 (3), 382–419.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zaenen, Annie, Carlette, Jean, Garretson, Gregory, Bresnan, Joan, Koontz-Garboden, Andrew, Nikitina, Tatiana, O’Connor, M. Catherine & Wasow, Tom. 2004. Animacy encoding in English: Why and how. In Webber, Bonnie & Byron, Donna (eds.), Proceedings of the 2004 ACL Workshop on Discourse Annotation, 118–25. East Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).CrossRefGoogle Scholar