4.4. Rosenbach (2005)

Source

Rosenbach, Anette (2005). Animacy versus weight as determinants of grammatical variation in English. Language 81. 613–644.

Overview

Rosenbach’s study analyses the influence of weight and animacy on word order in the English genitive noun phrase. She handed US-American native speakers a questionnaire in which they had to choose between the s-genitive and the of-genitive in text passages adopted from crime fiction novels. In a second step, she analysed genitive constructions from the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB), containing transcriptions of spoken and written English. In both steps, Rosenbach tested for animacy and weight together and for each factor separately. She found out that animacy and weight independently influence the choice of the genitive. Statistical methods were used to test whether the effects were significant.

Assessment

Rosenbach’s article offers a detailed, understandable explanation illustrated by tables and graphs. Her analysis itself uses neither statistics nor a corpus, rendering the design of the study a useful, relatively simple example for students who want to conduct research. Moreover, Rosenbach uses convergent evidence from a collection of texts and an experiment. Generally, the phenomenon of genitive alternation shows interesting parallels to the dative alternation. Some drawbacks of the study are its use of yes – no questions and the fact that different datasets are employed in the textual analysis and the experiment.

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