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On the (non-)equivalence of constructions with determiner genitives and noun modifiers in English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2019

ANETTE ROSENBACH
ANETTE ROSENBACH*
Affiliation:
UPSET Research Focus Area, North-West University, Hendrik van Eck Blvd, Vanderbijlkpark 1911, South Africa Tanagra Farm, PO Box 92, 6708 McGregor/Western Cape, South Africaanette@tanagra.co.za
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Abstract

The question of equivalence of constructions with determiner genitives (the FBI's director, the chair's leg) and noun modifiers (the FBI director, the chair leg) is a crucial one for Rosenbach's (2007a, 2010) approach to the gradience between genitive and noun + noun constructions as well as for any study of grammatical variation treating the two constructions as syntactic variants (Szmrecsanyi et al. 2016). However, the assumption that there is such equivalence has recently been challenged by Breban (2018) for English and Schlücker (2013, 2018) for German. The present article defends the view that determiner genitives and identifying noun modifiers are sufficiently similar to alternate in certain choice contexts from a variationist perspective, which, as will be shown, proceeds from a notion of equivalence different from the one adopted by in-depth semantic–pragmatic studies. Proper noun modifiers take a prominent role among identifying noun modifiers in their ability to alternate with determiner genitives, but the argument and analysis in this article is not restricted to them.

Keywords

determiner genitivesnoun modifiersgenitive variationgrammatical variation(notions of) equivalence
Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 23 , Special Issue 4: Different perspectives on proper noun modifiers , December 2019 , pp. 759 - 796
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

I would like to thank the editors of this special issue, Barbara Schlücker and the two anonymous reviewers for stimulating feedback on a first draft of this article. On this occasion I would also like to express my gratitude to Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm. Our collaboration and many discussions on the topic culminated in an unpublished paper (Koptjevskaja-Tamm & Rosenbach 2005). It is probably unavoidable that some of the ideas expressed in the present article go back to this collaborative work.

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