Variation in Nominal Possessive Expressions

Case Studies from Danish and Swedish
Erscheinungsjahr 2023
ISBN: 978-90-04-68215-3
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 22, 308 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 239 mm, Gewicht: 617 g

Reihe: Empirical Approaches to Linguistic Theory

This book is an account of the variation between two possessive constructions in Danish and Swedish: the s-genitive (husets tak ‘the house’s roof’), and the prepositional construction (taket på huset ‘the roof of the house’). Present-day corpus data, as well as historical data (texts from 1250–1550) are explored. Through statistical and qualitative analysis, various factors that influence the choice between the two constructions are identified. The book offers new data on the genitive variation in Danish and Swedish. The approach is also novel as two closely related Scandinavian languages are compared from both a historical and a contemporary perspective.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Piotrowska, Alicja

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Historische & Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements

List of Tables and Figures

Abbreviations

1 Introduction

1.1 Constraints in Possessive Variation

1.2 Aim and Research Hypotheses

1.3 Structure of the Book

2 Possession and Possessive Constructions

2.1 The Semantic Notions of Possession

2.2 The Sources of Possession

2.3 Attributive Possessive Constructions in the World’s Languages

3 Possessive Constructions in Present-Day Danish and Swedish

3.1 Standard Danish and Swedish

3.2 Dialects of Danish and Swedish

3.3 Possessives in the Other Nordic Languages

4 Methods, Sources and Tools

4.1 Methodology: Functionalism

4.2 The Corpora

4.3 Annotation of the Corpora

4.4 Statistical Tests

5 Possessive Constructions in the History of Danish and Swedish

5.1 Introduction

5.2 General Results

5.3 Variables Affecting the Selection of the Genitive Construction

5.4 Semantic Notions of Possession

5.5 Factors Favouring Possessive Constructions: Classification and Regression Tree Analysis

5.6 Summary

6 Possessive Variation in Present-Day Danish and Swedish

6.1 Introduction

6.2 General Frequencies of Attributive Possessive Constructions

6.3 Variables Affecting the Selection of the s-Genitive vs. the Prepositional Construction

6.4 Variation between the s-Genitive and the Prepositional Construction: Statistical Models

6.5 Summary

7 Discussion and Conclusions

7.1 The Corpus Studies – Summary

7.2 Constraints on the Use of Adnominal Possessives – Research Hypotheses Revisited

7.3 Implications for Further Research

Sources

The Historical Corpus

The Contemporary Corpus

References

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Alicja Piotrowska, Ph.D. (2021), Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, is Assistant Professor of Scandinavian linguistics at that university. She has published monographs and articles on the history of Scandinavian languages, including The Diachrony of Definiteness in North Germanic (Brill, 2021).