Abstract:
Much research on genitive alternation has been dedicated to investigating the
factors that influence the choice between the -s genitive and the of-genitive. The
focus of most of these studies has been on the role iconicity plays to motivate
these factors that influence the choice between the -s genitive and the of-genitive.
This thesis examines how the combination of iconicity and register variation
motivate the factors that influence genitive choice using Systemic Functional
Linguistics (SFL) as a theoretical framework. The main source of data for the
study is the British National Corpus (BNC). The analysis reveals that six factors
influence the choice between the -s genitive and the of-genitive: animacy,
alienability, concreteness, structural weight, topicality and definiteness. The
analysis again reveals that register variation can mediate some of these factors
in determining the choice between the -s genitive and the of-genitive. Quantitative
analysis of the data further shows that some of the factors significantly inhibit
others when they interact. Animacy is identified to be one such factor that greatly
affects others when it interacts with them. Another key finding from the analysis
of the data is that three out of the six factors (animacy, alienability and
concreteness) are motivated by iconicity through the iconicity principle of
conceptual distance. The findings of this research have implication for the
existing scholarship on genitive alternation and iconicity, pedagogy and further
research.
