FFF CONFERENCE CTF07

Anette Rosenbach - Emerging variation: determiner genitives and noun modifiers in English

In Present-day English it is sometimes possible to use either a nounmodifier or a (determiner) s-genitive to express essentially the samepropositional meaning; compare the examples in (1).


(1)    a.    The museum shop /museum’s shop was closed.
         b.    Bush’sadministration/ The Bush administration reacted too latein     New Orleans.
         c.    Make a note to book for Sunday lunch/ Sunday’s lunch.
         d.    Here’s a map of the London underground/London’s underground.
         e.    The FBI’s director/ FBI director gave a press conference yesterday.


   In this talk I argue that such variation was not presentin earlier periods of English, but only arose in the course of (mainly)Modern English as a result of the fact that both s-genitives and nounmodifiers have come to be used with new semantic classes of nouns.Based on the results of a diachronic corpus analysis, covering theperiod between 1650 and 1999, I will show that noun modifiers arepredominantly inanimate, but that in the Modern English period theygradually also begin to occur with collective and human nouns. Thespread of noun modifiers up the animacy scale will then be related tothe well-documented spread of s-genitives down the animacy scale, i.e.the fact that s-genitives have increasingly come to be used with nounslow in animacy in Modern English (cf. e.g. Rosenbach 2002, andreferences cited therein). This semantic shift of s-genitives and nounmodifiers helped to create contexts which are both compatible withdeterminer and classifier function, i.e. the functions typicallyexpressed by determiner s-genitives and noun modifiers, respectively.Such semantic ‘hybrids’ made variation between two otherwise quitedistinct constructions possible.

 

References

Rosenbach, Anette (2002): Genitivevariation in English. New York: Mouton deGruyter.

 

Rosenbach, Anette (2007): Emergingvariation: determiner genitivesand noun modifiers in English English Languageand Linguistics 11(1):143-189.