'Women's language' or 'The language of women'? A corpus-based study of genitive alternation in native and non-native English academic writing

Genitive alternation is defined as the choice between the Saxon genitive (e.g. women’s language) and the of-genitive (e.g. the language of women). However, it is unclear which genitive construction is favoured by university-level native and learner speakers of English, nor the weights of the factors moderating their choice for one structure or the other. In the present MA dissertation, the preferred genitive structure and the relative weights of the factors influencing genitive choice in native and learner English academic writing are determined by analysing a richly annotated dataset of 750 interchangeable genitives extracted from the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus, and the French and Norwegian subsets of the Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase (VESPA) learner corpus. The results show that both native and learner writers of academic English with different first language backgrounds favour the of-genitive, but with slight differences in the strength of their preference for this structure which can be accounted for by the existence of a structure alternation for genitive in their mother tongue. Tree-structure modelling further indicates that the most significant predictor of genitive choice is the animacy of the possessor, followed by length measures of possessor or possessum, whereas the variety of English (i.e. native, French-L1, and Norwegian-L1 learner English) does not significantly affect genitive choice. This MA dissertation thus demonstrates that the varieties of English under study share a core probabilistic grammar, and provides insight into the probabilistic knowledge of English grammar.