This paper takes up the recent discussion of what controls speakers’ use of the -s and of- genitives, as in the university’s budget and the budget of the university. Most of the paper deals directly with control of that “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 (*a petrol’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 of that third variant, arguing that the university budget truly is genitive.
Fahy, Matthew, Jesse Egbert, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi & Douglas Biber
2022. Comparing Logistic Regression, Multinomial Regression, Classification Trees and Random Forests Applied to Ternary Variables. In Data and Methods in Corpus Linguistics, ► pp. 194 ff.
Hackert, Stephanie & Diana Wengler
2022. Recent Grammatical Change in Postcolonial Englishes: A Real-time Study of Genitive Variation in Caribbean and Indian News Writing. Journal of English Linguistics 50:1 ► pp. 3 ff.
Taylor, Roxanne
2022. Lexical and functional adpositions: the view from <em>of</em> in Old and present-day English. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 7:1
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt, Douglas Biber, Jesse Egbert & Karlien Franco
2016. Toward more accountability: Modeling ternary genitive variation in Late Modern English. Language Variation and Change 28:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
ROSENBACH, ANETTE
2014. English genitive variation – the state of the art. English Language and Linguistics 18:2 ► pp. 215 ff.
ROSENBACH, ANETTE
2019. On the (non-)equivalence of constructions with determiner genitives and noun modifiers in English. English Language and Linguistics 23:4 ► pp. 759 ff.
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