Abstract
Biber, Szmrecsanyi, Reppen & Larsson (2023) argue for a more liberal inclusion of genitive variants, evoking Labov's principle of accountability (Labov 1969: 737–8, fn. 20, 1972), which calls for the inclusion of all variants that are functionally equivalent and allow variation. They suggest that the term ‘genitive’ should be defined grammatically, as a restrictive modifier to the head noun, rather than semantically in terms of a possessive relation, thus redefining the linguistic variable for English genitive variation. In particular, they include noun modifiers as a third genitive variant (with s-genitives and of-genitives). In this reply I argue that the authors proceed from a notion of ‘genitive’ that is too broad, including variants that are not functionally equivalent and contexts that are not variable, thus actually violating the principle of accountability.
Published Version
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