Factors determining genitive alternation in English: The role of register variation and iconicity

Abstract

Much research on genitive alternation has been dedicated to investigating the factors that influence the choice between the -s genitive and the of-genitive. The focus of most of these studies has been on the role iconicity plays to motivate these factors that influence the choice between the -s genitive and the of-genitive. This thesis examines how the combination of iconicity and register variation motivate the factors that influence genitive choice using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as a theoretical framework. The main source of data for the study is the British National Corpus (BNC). The analysis reveals that six factors influence the choice between the -s genitive and the of-genitive: animacy, alienability, concreteness, structural weight, topicality and definiteness. The analysis again reveals that register variation can mediate some of these factors in determining the choice between the -s genitive and the of-genitive. Quantitative analysis of the data further shows that some of the factors significantly inhibit others when they interact. Animacy is identified to be one such factor that greatly affects others when it interacts with them. Another key finding from the analysis of the data is that three out of the six factors (animacy, alienability and concreteness) are motivated by iconicity through the iconicity principle of conceptual distance. The findings of this research have implication for the existing scholarship on genitive alternation and iconicity, pedagogy and further research.