Emerging variation: determiner genitives and noun modifiers in English

Abstract

This article discusses the emerging variation between determiner genitives and noun modifiers in Present-day English. Based on the results of corpus analyses and previous studies I show that this variation (1) was not present in earlier English, and (2) results from the fact that determiner genitives have come to be used with nouns low in animacy while noun modifiers have come to be used with nouns high in animacy (mainly) in the course of Modern English. This semantic shift (or rather ‘convergence’) of genitives and noun modifiers has helped to create contexts which are compatible with both determiner and classifier function, i.e. the functions typically expressed by determiner genitives and noun modifiers, respectively. The article complements earlier work on the gradience between s-genitive constructions and noun+noun constructions (Rosenbach, 2006a), providing fur-ther evidence for the claim that semantic overlap may give rise to constructional gradience.