Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-01T00:32:10.853Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Genitive variation: the niche role of the oblique genitive1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 June 2014

JOHN PAYNE  and
EVA BERLAGE
JOHN PAYNE
Affiliation:
Linguistics and English Language, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, [email protected]
EVA BERLAGE
Affiliation:
Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Hamburg, Von-Melle-Park 6, 20146 Hamburg, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article discusses the niche role that the oblique genitive of the type the friend of John’s occupies in the context of genitive variation. The article shows that the oblique genitive should be considered an independent construction which competes marginally in two syntactic contexts with the s-genitive (as in John's friend) and the of-genitive (as in the friend of John). The first context is one in which all three constructions function as the predicative complement of the clause (e.g. He is a friend of John's / John's friend / a friend of John). Note that in this context the definiteness effect of the s-genitive is downplayed, so that competition is possible with indefiniteness of the other two constructions. The second context is one where the oblique genitive and the of-genitive are introduced by the determiner the. Contrary to the claim that oblique genitive constructions introduced by the definite article must receive restrictive modification of the head (see e.g. Barker 1998; Lyons 1986), the quantitative data presented in this article reveal that oblique genitives introduced by the determiner the are not confined to pre- or postmodification of the head but can occur, albeit rarely, without any modification as in the example the executor of Sir Ralph’s.

The article further compares the oblique genitive, s-genitive and of-genitive with respect to the following five features: noun-headed vs pronoun dependent; animacy of the dependent; length of the noun-headed dependent; determiner of the head; and the semantic relations that can hold between head (e.g. friend) and dependent (e.g. John). The most intriguing theoretical conclusion is that the semantic relations available to head and dependent in the oblique genitive are a subset of those found in the s-genitive, which, again constitute a subset of those that exist in the of-genitive. This means that variation between all three constructions is not only restricted to the two syntactic contexts outlined above but also to a shared set of semantic relations.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 18 , Issue 2: Genitive variation in English , July 2014 , pp. 331 - 360
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

We would like to thank the participants of the ISLE 2 workshop on ‘Genitive variation in English’ in June 2011 for many fruitful comments on this paper. Also, we are extremely grateful for the feedback provided by the two reviewers. All remaining mistakes are, of course, our own.

References

Abel, Jennifer. 2006. That crazy idea of hers: The English double genitive as focus construction. The Canadian Journal of Linguistics / La Revue Canadienne de Linguistique 51 (1), 1–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Altenberg, Bengt. 1982. The genitive v. the of-construction: A study of syntactic variation in 17th century English. Malmö: CWK Gleerup.Google Scholar
Barker, Chris. 1998. Partitives, double genitives and anti-uniqueness. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 16 (4), 679–717.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Behaghel, Otto. 1909. Beziehungen zwischen Umfang und Reihenfolge von Satzgliedern. Indogermanische Forschungen 25, 110–42.Google Scholar
Börjars, Kersti, Denison, David, Krajewski, Grzegorz & Scott, Alan. 2013. Expression of possession in English: The significance of the right edge. In Börjars, Kersti, Denison, David & Scott, Alan (eds.), Morphosyntactic categories and the expression of possession, 123–48. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Christianson, Kiel. 1997. A text analysis of the English double genitive. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 35 (2), 99–113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fraurud, Kari. 1990. Definiteness and the processing of noun phrases in natural discourse. Journal of Semantics 7, 395–433.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney & Pullum, Geoffrey K.et al. 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackendoff, Ray. 1968. Possessives in English. In Anderson, Stephen R., Jackendoff, Ray S. & Keyser, Samuel Jay (eds.), Studies in transformational grammar and related topics, 25–51. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press. Revised version translated into French by Edmond Grimberg 1969. Les constructions possessives en anglais. Langages 14(1), 7–27.Google Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H. 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: Winter.Google Scholar
Lyons, Christopher. 1986. The syntax of English genitive constructions. Journal of Linguistics 22, 123–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O’Connor, Catherine, Maling, Joan & Skarabela, Barbora. 2013. Nominal categories and the expression of possession: A cross-linguistic study of probabilistic tendencies and categorical constraints. In Börjars, Kersti, Denison, David & Scott, Alan (eds.), Morphosyntactic categories and the expression of possession, 89–122. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Payne, John & Huddleston, Rodney. 2002. Nouns and noun phrases. In Huddleston, Rodney & Pullum, Geoffrey K.et al., The Cambridge grammar of the English language, 323–523. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Payne, John. 2013. The oblique genitive in English. In Börjars, Kersti, Denison, David & Scott, Alan (eds.), Morphosyntactic categories and the expression of possession, 177–92. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Payne, John, Pullum, Geoffrey K., Scholz, Barbara & Berlage, Eva. 2013. Anaphoric one and its implications. Language 89 (4), 794–829.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan. 1972. A grammar of contemporary English. London and New York: Longman.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. 2005. Animacy versus weight as determinants of grammatical variation in English. Language 81, 613–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenbach, Anette. This volume. English genitive variation – the state of the art.Google Scholar
Taylor, John R. 1989. Possessive genitives in English. Linguistics 27, 663–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar