On the genitive's trail: data and method from a sociolinguistic perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research on the English genitive (e.g. Rosenbach 2007: 154) reports increasing use of the s- variant. This has been explained as extension to inanimate possessors, a semantic shift (e.g. Hundt 1998; Rosenbach 2002), or due to the pressures of economy in journalism, a register change (Hinrichs & Szmrecsanyi 2007; Szmrecsanyi & Hinrichs 2008). The present work reports on a large-scale sociolinguistic investigation of the genitive in vernacular Canadian English using socially stratified corpora and individuals of all ages. The results show that human, prototypical possessors are 96 per cent s -genitive and non-humans are 95 per cent of- genitive. Within the small envelope where both forms are possible, we discover that variation patterns quite differently depending on animacy. For humans, use of the s- genitive is stable in apparent time and correlates with whether or not the possessor ends in a sibilant. In contrast, non-human collectives/organizations reveal an increasing use of s- genitives in apparent time and a favouring effect of short possessors, persistence (when an s- genitive has occurred recently in the previous discourse) and when the individual has a blue-collar job. Groups comprising humans (collectives and organizations), such as our church's youth group , and places that are possible locations for humans (countries, cities, etc.), as in Toronto's best restaurant , are the prime conduit for this change. These findings from vernacular speech confirm the extension of the s -genitive in inanimates by semantic extension.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.162 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".