Variation in English genitives across modality and genres

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.

Spoken syntax in a comparative perspective: The dative and genitive alternation in varieties of English

“…The most likely reason for this failure is that the present study examines spontaneous spoken data, while Hinrichs & Szmrecsanyi (2007) examined written-edited-published language from sections of the Brown corpora. Recent work has found sizeable differences in genitive usage across spoken and written modes and registers, even within the same variety (Grafmiller 2014), thus the results presented here should be interpreted within the larger context of what we know about genitive variation across different modes, registers and communities. 7 Finally, we note that none of the probabilistic contrasts that our analysis unearths emerge as significant in Heller et al (2017), a recent study on probabilistic genitive variation that covers the same varieties that are represented in Table 4, albeit using different multivariate designs and on the basis of different, more acrolectal and less vernacular data sources (the International Corpus of English and the Corpus of Global Web-Based English).…”

8 Rhythm’s role in genitive construction choice in spoken English

“…Exploration of rhythm in written data is saved for further research (see Grafmiller 2014). The Switchboard corpus consists of telephone conversations between native American English speakers who did not know each other and were assigned random, predetermined conversation topics.…”

Empirical perspectives on two potential epicenters: The genitive alternation in Asian Englishes

“…Also of importance for the genitive alternation is the discourse accessibility of the constituents, which is used as an umbrella term for the factors givenness, thematicity, and overall frequency here. If a possessor has been mentioned in the previous context of a genitive construction (i.e., it is given), it is more likely to be expressed in the s-form than if the possessor is discourse-new (e.g., Hinrichs and Szmrecsanyi 2007;Jankowski 2013;Grafmiller 2014). Besides givenness, the degree to which a possessor constitutes a central topic of a text -its thematicity -also makes a difference.…”