Her daughter's being taken into care or her daughter being taken …? Genitive and common-case marking of subjects of verbal gerund clauses in Present-day English
-
Susanna Lyne
Abstract
This article deals with the variation between genitive and common-case NPs as subjects of verbal gerunds in Present-day British English, as in As compensation for Polly’s (Polly) keeping the house, Preston had received twenty thousand pounds. Previous research on the topic has mostly focused on personal pronouns and the possessive/objective distinction, wheras the present paper draws attention to other NPs, those which take or do not take the genitive ’s.
The material comprises 16 million words from the British National Corpus, representing the four genres Academic Prose, Fiction, News, and Conversation. Methods of retrieval are discussed in some detail, since searches for NPs in the common case proved to require manual scanning.
Results show that the genitive form is very infrequent in Present-day English, but figures more often than not in formal texts; this finding is in accordance with modern grammars such as Quirk et al. (1985). More than 50% of all genitives are found in the Academic Prose genre, whereas Conversation displays no genitives at all. Common-case forms are seen to be spread more evenly across genres. Moreover, the linguistic factors phonology, animacy and NP length are seen to have influence on the choice of form.
Abstract
This article deals with the variation between genitive and common-case NPs as subjects of verbal gerunds in Present-day British English, as in As compensation for Polly’s (Polly) keeping the house, Preston had received twenty thousand pounds. Previous research on the topic has mostly focused on personal pronouns and the possessive/objective distinction, wheras the present paper draws attention to other NPs, those which take or do not take the genitive ’s.
The material comprises 16 million words from the British National Corpus, representing the four genres Academic Prose, Fiction, News, and Conversation. Methods of retrieval are discussed in some detail, since searches for NPs in the common case proved to require manual scanning.
Results show that the genitive form is very infrequent in Present-day English, but figures more often than not in formal texts; this finding is in accordance with modern grammars such as Quirk et al. (1985). More than 50% of all genitives are found in the Academic Prose genre, whereas Conversation displays no genitives at all. Common-case forms are seen to be spread more evenly across genres. Moreover, the linguistic factors phonology, animacy and NP length are seen to have influence on the choice of form.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- List of contributors vii
- Exploring the dynamics of linguistic variation through public and private corpora 1
-
Part I. Creating discourse
- Introduction 13
- ' And so now …': The grammaticalisation and (inter)subjectification of now 17
- Self-repetition in spoken English discourse 37
- Modal adverbs in interaction – obviously and definitely in adolescent speech 61
- Pressing -ing into service: I don't want you coming around here any more 85
-
Part II. Moving across varieties
- Introduction 101
- Conversations from the speech community: Exploring language variation in synchronic dialect corpora 107
- The English modals and semi-modals: Regional and stylistic variation 129
- Patterns of negation: The relationship between NO and NOT in regional varieties of English 147
- Verb-complementational profiles across varieties of English: Comparing verb classes in Indian English and British English 163
- Angloversals? Concord and interrogatives in contact varieties of English 183
- South Pacific Englishes – Unity and diversity in the usage of the present perfect 203
-
Part III. Levelling out variability
- Introduction 223
- Feature loss in 19th century Irish English 229
- The written wor(l)ds of men and women in early white Australia 245
- The progressive and phrasal verbs: Evidence of colloquialization in nineteenth-century English? 269
- Probabilistic determinants of genitive variation in spoken and written English: A multivariate comparison across time, space, and genres 291
- Her daughter's being taken into care or her daughter being taken …? Genitive and common-case marking of subjects of verbal gerund clauses in Present-day English 311
- Subject index 335
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- List of contributors vii
- Exploring the dynamics of linguistic variation through public and private corpora 1
-
Part I. Creating discourse
- Introduction 13
- ' And so now …': The grammaticalisation and (inter)subjectification of now 17
- Self-repetition in spoken English discourse 37
- Modal adverbs in interaction – obviously and definitely in adolescent speech 61
- Pressing -ing into service: I don't want you coming around here any more 85
-
Part II. Moving across varieties
- Introduction 101
- Conversations from the speech community: Exploring language variation in synchronic dialect corpora 107
- The English modals and semi-modals: Regional and stylistic variation 129
- Patterns of negation: The relationship between NO and NOT in regional varieties of English 147
- Verb-complementational profiles across varieties of English: Comparing verb classes in Indian English and British English 163
- Angloversals? Concord and interrogatives in contact varieties of English 183
- South Pacific Englishes – Unity and diversity in the usage of the present perfect 203
-
Part III. Levelling out variability
- Introduction 223
- Feature loss in 19th century Irish English 229
- The written wor(l)ds of men and women in early white Australia 245
- The progressive and phrasal verbs: Evidence of colloquialization in nineteenth-century English? 269
- Probabilistic determinants of genitive variation in spoken and written English: A multivariate comparison across time, space, and genres 291
- Her daughter's being taken into care or her daughter being taken …? Genitive and common-case marking of subjects of verbal gerund clauses in Present-day English 311
- Subject index 335
