Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T22:57:49.219Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

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.

References

Adamson, Sylvia. 2000. A lovely little example: Word order options and category shift in the prenominal string. In Fischer, Olga, Rosenbach, Anette & Stein, Dieter (eds.), Pathways of change, 39–66. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Aijmer, Karin & Altenberg, Bengt (eds.). 2013. Studies in corpus linguistics: Advances in corpus-based contrastive linguistics: Studies in honour of Stig Johansson. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Barker, Chris. 1995. Possessive descriptions. Stanford: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Barker, Chris. 1998. Partitives, double genitives and anti-uniqueness. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 16, 679–717.Google Scholar
Barker, Chris. 2011. Possessives and relational nouns. In Maienborn, Claudia, von Heusinger, Klaus & Portner, Paul (eds.), Semantics: An international handbook of natural language meaning, 1109–30. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Bauer, Laurie. 1998. When is a sequence of two nouns a compound in English? English Language and Linguistics 2(1), 65–86.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas & Clark, Victoria. 2002. Historical shifts in modification pattern with complex noun phrase structures. In Fanego, Teresa, López-Couso, Maria José & Pérez-Guerra, Javier (eds.), English historical syntax and morphology: Selected papers from 11 ICEHL, Santiago de Compostela, 7–11 September 2000, 43–66. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas & Gray, Bethany. 2011. Grammatical change in the noun phrase: The influence of written language use. English Language and Linguistics 15(2), 223–50.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas & Gray, Bethany. 2016. Grammatical complexity in academic English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Grieve, Jack & Iberri-Shea, Gina. 2009. Noun phrase modification. In Rohdenburg, Günter & Schlüter, Julia (eds.), One language, two grammars? Differences between British and American English, 182–93. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan & Finegan, Edward. 1999. Longman grammar of spoken and written English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Birner, Betty & Ward, Gregory. 1994. Uniqueness, familiarity and the definite article in English. Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 93–102.Google Scholar
Bolinger, Dwight. 1977. Meaning and form. 3rd impression 1983. London and New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Breban, Tine. 2018. Proper names used as modifiers: A comprehensive functional analysis. English Language and Linguistics 22(3), 381–401.Google Scholar
Breban, Tine & De Smet, Hendrik. 2019. How do grammatical patterns emerge? The origins and development of the English proper noun modifier construction. English Language and Linguistics 23(4), 879–900.Google Scholar
Breban, Tine & Kolkmann, Julia (eds.). 2019. Different perspectives on proper noun modifiers. Special issue, English Language and Linguistics 23(4).Google Scholar
Breban, Tine, Kolkmann, Julia & Payne, John. 2019. The impact of semantic relations on grammatical alternation: An experimental study of proper name modifiers and determiner genitives. English Language and Linguistics 23(4), 797–826.Google Scholar
Cappelle, Bert. 2006. Particle placement and the case for ‘allostructions’. In Schönefeld, Doris (ed.), Constructions all over: Case studies and theoretical implications. Special issue of Constructions, 1, available at www.constructionsonline.deGoogle Scholar
Clark, Herbert H. 1977. Inference in comprehension. In LaBerge, David & Samuels, S. Jay (eds.), Basic processes in reading: Perception and comprehension, 243–63. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Clark, Herbert H. & Haviland, Susan E.. 1977. Comprehension and the given – new contract. In Freedle, Roy O. (ed.), Discourse processes: Advances in research and theory, 1–40. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Croft, William. 2000. Explaining language change. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Cruse, Alan D. 2000. Meaning in language. An introduction to semantics and pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Feist, Jim. 2012. What controls the ‘genitive variation’ in Present-day English? Studies in Language 36(2), 261–99.Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th. & Stefanowitsch, Anatol. 2004. Extending collostructional analysis. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9(1), 97–129.Google Scholar
Gundel, Jeanette, Hedberg, Nancy & Zacharski, Ron. 1993. Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language 69, 274–307.Google Scholar
Gundel, Jeanette, Hedberg, Nancy & Zacharski, Ron. 2001. Definite descriptions and cognitive status in English: Why accommodation is unnecessary. English Language and Linguistics 5(2), 273–95.Google Scholar
Günther, Christine. 2019. A difficult to explain phenomenon: Increasing complexity in the prenominal position. English Language and Linguistics 23(3), 645–70. [Published online 2018]Google Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K. 1970. Functional diversity in language. Foundations of Language 6, 322–61.Google Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K. 1994. An introduction to functional grammar, 2nd edition. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K. 2004. An introduction to functional grammar, 3rd revised edition (revised by Matthiessen, Christian M. I. M.). London: Hodder Arnold.Google Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin. 1999. Explaining article–possessor complementarity: Economic motivation in noun phrase syntax. Language 75(2), 227–43.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John A. 1978. Definiteness and indefiniteness: A study in reference and grammaticality prediction. London: Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John A. 1991. On (in)definite articles: Implicatures and (un)grammaticality prediction. Journal of Linguistics 27, 405–42.Google Scholar
Heine, Bernd. 1997. Possession: Cognitive sources, forces, and grammaticalisation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hopper, Paul & Traugott, Elizabeth C.. 1993. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney. 1984. Introduction to the grammar of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jacobson, Sven. 1980. Issues in the study of syntactic variation. In Jacobson, Sven (ed.), Papers from the Scandinavian symposium on syntactic variation, Stockholm, May 18–19, 1979, 23–36. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.Google Scholar
Keizer, Evelien. 2007. The English noun phrase. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria. 2001. Adnominal possession. In Haspelmath, Martin, König, Ekkehard, Oesterreicher, Wulf & Raible, Wolfgang (eds.). Language typology and language universals (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 20.1, 2), vol. 2, 960–70. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria. 2002. Adnominal possession in the European languages: Form and function. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 55, 141–72.Google Scholar
Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria. 2009. Proper-name compounds in Swedish between syntax and lexicon. Rivista di Linguistica / Italian Journal of Linguistics 21, 119–48.Google Scholar
Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria. 2013. A Mozart sonata and the Palme murder: The structure and uses of proper-name compounds in Swedish. In Kersti, Börjars, Denison, David & Scott, Alan (eds.), Morphosyntactic categories and the expression of possession, 253–90. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria & Rosenbach, Anette. 2005. On the fuzziness of nominal determination. MS, University of Stockholm and University of Düsseldorf. https://freelancehaven.weebly.com/uploads/5/0/1/1/5011326/fuzziness_of_nominal_determination.pdfGoogle Scholar
Krug, Manfred, Schlüter, Julia & Rosenbach, Anette. 2013. Introduction. Investigating language variation and change. In Krug, Manfred & Schlüter, Julia (eds.), Research methods in language variation and change, 1–14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald W. 1995. Possession and possessive constructions. In Taylor, John R. & MacLaury, Robert E. (eds.), Language and the cognitive construal of the world, 51–79. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Lieber, Rochelle. 1988. Phrasal compounds in English and the morphology-syntax interface. Papers from the Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society 24(2), 202–22.Google Scholar
Löbner, Sebastian. 1985. Definites. Journal of Semantics 4, 279–326.Google Scholar
Löbner, Sebastian. 1998. Definite associative anaphora. In Botley, Simon (ed.), Approaches to discourse anaphora. Proceedings of DAARC96 – Discourse Anaphora and Resolution Colloquium. Lancaster University, July 17th–18th. Lancaster: Lancaster University. http://user.phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de/~loebner/publ/DAA-03.pdfGoogle Scholar
Löbner, Sebastian. 2011. Concept types and determination. Journal of Semantics 28(3), 279–333.Google Scholar
Lyons, Christopher. 1986. The syntax of English genitive constructions. Journal of Linguistics 22, 123–43.Google Scholar
Lyons, Christopher. 1999. Definiteness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lyons, John. 1995. Linguistic semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
McGregor, William (ed.). 2009a. The expression of possession. Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar
McGregor, William. 2009b. Introduction. In McGregor, (ed.), 1–12.Google Scholar
Nichols, Johanna. 1988. On alienable and inalienable possession. In Shipley, William (ed.), In honor of Mary Haas: From the Haas festival conference on native American linguistics, 557–609. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Nikiforidou, Kiki. 1991. The meanings of the genitive: A case study in semantic structure and semantic change. Cognitive Linguistics 2, 149–205.Google Scholar
Payne, John & Berlage, Eva. 2014. Genitive variation: The niche role of the oblique genitive. English Language and Linguistics 18(2), 331–60.Google Scholar
Payne, John & Huddleston, Rodney. 2002. Nouns and noun phrases. In Huddleston, Rodney & Pullum, Geoffrey K. (eds.), The Cambridge grammar of the English language, 323–523. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Peters, Stanley & Westerståhl, Dag. 2013. The semantics of possessives. Language 89(4), 713–59.Google Scholar
Plank, Frans. 1992. Possessives and the distinction between determiners and modifiers (with special reference to German). Journal of Linguistics 28, 453–68.Google Scholar
Postal, Paul. 1969. Anaphoric islands. Proceedings of the Fifth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society 5, 205–39.Google Scholar
Prince, Ellen. 1981. Toward a taxonomy of given-new information. In Cole, Peter (ed.), Radical pragmatics, 223–55. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London and New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Rijkhoff, Jan. 1989. The identification of referents. In Connolly, John H. & Dik, Simon (eds.), Functional grammar and the computer, 229–46. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Rijkhoff, Jan. 2002. The noun phrase, 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Rijkhoff, Jan. 2009. On the co-variation between form and function of adnominal possessive modifiers in Dutch and English. In McGregor, (ed.), 51–106.Google Scholar
Rissanen, Matti. 1999. Syntax. In Lass, Roger (ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language, vol. III: 1476–1776, 187–331. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Rosenbach, Anette. 2002. Genitive variation in English: Conceptual factors in synchronic and diachronic studies. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Rosenbach, Anette. 2006. Descriptive genitives in English: A case study on constructional gradience. English Language and Linguistics 10(1), 77–118.Google Scholar
Rosenbach, Anette. 2007a. Emerging variation: Determiner genitives and noun modifiers in English. English Language and Linguistics 11(1), 143–89.Google Scholar
Rosenbach, Anette. 2007b. Exploring constructions on the web: A case study. In Hundt, Marianne, Nesselhauf, Nadja & Biewer, Carolin (eds.), Corpus linguistics and the web, 167–90. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Rosenbach, Anette. 2009. Identifying noun modifiers in English. Manuscript, University of Paderborn. https://freelancehaven.weebly.com/uploads/5/0/1/1/5011326/identifying_noun_modifiers_in_english_ms_2009.pdfGoogle Scholar
Rosenbach, Anette. 2010. How synchronic gradience makes sense in the light of language change (and vice versa). In Traugott, Elizabeth C. & Trousdale, Graeme (eds.), Gradience, gradualness and grammaticalization, 149–79. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Rosenbach, Anette. 2014. English genitive variation – the state of the art. English Language and Linguistics 18(2), 215–62.Google Scholar
Rosenbach, Anette. 2017. Constraints in contact: Animacy in English and Afrikaans genitive variation – a cross-linguistic perspective. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 2(1), 72. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.292Google Scholar
Rosenbach, Anette & Vezzosi, Letizia. 2000. Genitive constructions in Early Modern English: New evidence from a corpus analysis. In Sornicola, Rosanna, Poppe, Erich & Shisha-Halevy, Ariel (eds.), Stability, variation and change of word-order patterns over time, 285–307. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Schlücker, Barbara. 2013. Non-classifying compounds in German. Folia Linguistica 47(2), 449–80.Google Scholar
Schlücker, Barbara. 2018. Genitives and proper name compounds in German. In Ackermann, Tanja, Simon, Horst & Zimmer, Christian (eds.), Germanic genitives, 275–99. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Seiler, HansJakob. 1978. Determination: A functional dimension for interlanguage comparison. In Seiler, HansJakob (ed.), Language universals: Papers from the conference held at Gummersbach (Cologne), Germany, October 3–8, 1976, 301–26. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.Google Scholar
Seiler, HansJakob. 1983. Possession as an operational dimension of language. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.Google Scholar
Sproat, Richard. 1988. On anaphoric islandhood. In Hammond, Michael & Noonan, Michael (eds.), Theoretical morphology, 291–301. Orlando: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Ström Herold, Jenny & Levin, Magnus. 2019. The Obama presidency, the Macintosh keyboard and the Norway fiasco: English proper noun modifiers and their correspondences in German and Swedish. English Language and Linguistics 23(4), 827–54.Google Scholar
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt, Biber, Douglas, Egbert, Jesse & Franco, Karlien. 2016. Toward more accountability: Modeling ternary genitive variation in Late Modern English. Language Variation and Change 28(1), 1–29.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali. 2006. Analysing sociolinguistic variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, John. 1989. Possessive genitives in English. Linguistics 27, 663–86.Google Scholar
Taylor, John. 1996. Possessives in English. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
Teyssier, Jaques. 1968. Notes on the syntax of the adjective in Modern English. Lingua 20, 225–49.Google Scholar
Vikner, Carl & Jensen, Per A.. 2002. A semantic analysis of the English genitive: Interaction of lexcial and formal semantics. Studia Linguistica 56(2), 191–226.Google Scholar
von Heusinger, Klaus. 2002. Specificity and definiteness in sentence and discourse structure. Journal of Semantics 19, 245–74.Google Scholar
von Heusinger, Klaus. 2007. Referentially anchoring indefinites. In Comorovski, Ileana & von Heusinger, Klaus (eds.), Existence: Semantics and syntax, 273–92. Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar
von Heusinger, Klaus. 2011. Specificity. In von Heusinger, Klaus, Maienborn, Claudia & Portner, Paul (eds.), Semantics: An international handbook of natural language meaning, vol. 2, 1025–57. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Walker, James A. 2010. Variation in linguistic systems. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ward, Gregory, Sproat, Richard & McKoon, Gail. 1991. A pragmatic analysis of so-called anaphoric islands. Language 67(3), 439–74.Google Scholar
Weiner, E. Judith & Labov, William. 1983. Constraints on the agentless passive. Journal of Linguistics 19, 29–58.Google Scholar
Weinreich, Uriel, Labov, William & Herzog, Marvin. 1968. Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In Lehmann, Winfrid & Malkiel, Yakov (eds.), Directions for historical linguistics, 95–188. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Willemse, Peter. 2007. Indefinite possessive NPs and the distinction between determining and non-determining genitives in English. English Language and Linguistics 11(3), 537–68.Google Scholar
Willemse, Peter, Davidse, Kristin & Heyvaert, Liesbeth. 2009. English possessives as reference-point constructions and their function in discourse. In McGregor, (ed.), 13–50.Google Scholar
Woisetschlaeger, Ernst. 1983. On the question of definiteness in ‘an old man's book’. Linguistic Inquiry 14(1), 137–54.Google Scholar
Zifonun, Gisela. 2010. Possessive Attribute im Deutschen. Deutsche Sprache 38: 124–52.Google Scholar