This study of present-day English genitive variation is based on all interchangeable instances of s-and of-genitives from the 'Reportage' and 'Editorial' categories of the 'Brown family' of corpora. Variation is studied by tapping into a number of independent variables, such as precedence of either construction in the text, length of the possessor and possessum phrases, phonological constraints, discourse flow, and animacy of the possessor. In addition to distributional analyses, we use logistic regression to investigate the probabilistic factor weights of these variables, thus tracking language change in progress as evidenced in the language of the press. This method, married to our large database, yields the most detailed perspective to date on frequently discussed issues, such as the relative importance of possessor animacy and end-weight in genitive choice (cf. most recently Rosenbach 2005), or on the exact factorial dynamics responsible for the ongoing spread of the s-genitive.

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We present a cross-constructional approach to the history of the genitive alternation and the dative alternation in Late Modern English (AD 1650 to AD 1999), drawing on richly annotated datasets and modern statistical modeling techniques. We identify cross-constructional similarities in the development of the genitive and the dative alternation over time (mainly with regard to the loosening of the animacy constraint), a development which parallels distributional changes in animacy categories in the corpus material. Theoretically, we transfer the notion of 'probabilistic grammar' to historical data and claim that the corpus models presented reflect past speakers' knowledge about the distribution of genitive and dative variants. The historical data also helps to determine what is constant (and timeless) in the effect of selected factors such as animacy or length, and what is variant.* We express our thanks to the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) for funding the project "Predicting syntax in space and time". We are also grateful to the audiences of the March 2010 workshop on "Probabilistic syntax: Phonetics, diachrony and synchrony" (hosted by the FRIAS) and the November 2010 workshop on "The development of syntactic alternations" (Stanford University) for constructive feedback. We acknowledge helpful comments and suggestions by Ludovic De Cuypere, Beth Levin and Joanna Nykiel, and owe gratitude to Stephanie Shih for advice on coding final sibilancy, and to Katharina Ehret, whose assistance has contributed significantly to the development of our research. Lastly, three anonymous referees provided us with extremely helpful and constructive comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimers apply. The third author is grateful to the University of Paderborn for providing her access to their on-line library resources while working on this article.

Probabilistic Determinants of genitive variation in spoken and written English: a multivariate comparison across time, space, and genres ABSTRACT. This is a paper about language variation and about language change, investigating the competition between the s-genitive and the of-genitive in Modern English (written and spoken, British and American) as a case study. Drawing on a range of spoken and written corpora and considering a multivariate envelope of seven major conditioning factors (such as possessor animacy and end-weight), we seek to uncover, first, how the probabilistic preferences of British and American journalists might have changed between the 1960s and 1990s, and, second, how such changes in written English relate to the way speakers of English choose between the two genitives. We find that the s-genitive is comparatively frequent in both spoken English and contemporary journalistic English thanks to quite different reasons, and that the recent spread of the s-genitive in press English is due to a process of economization rather than colloquialization.

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