Constraints in contact: Animacy in English and Afrikaans genitive variation – a cross-linguistic perspective

What it is about

English has two possessive constructions: the s-genitive (the dog's tail) and the of-genitive (the roof of the car). Animate possessors take the s-genitive more often, an animacy split that the paper places in a wider typology of possession splits. Afrikaans has a similar split with the prenominal se-genitive, but the paper shows that Afrikaans uses se more freely with inanimate possessors. A corpus of 1,386 genitive tokens from a parallel Afrikaans-English novel pair (an original and its translation) gives 28.3% se with inanimate possessors against 12% s-genitive in English. A forced-choice experiment with 130 speakers, on 11 passages with inanimate definite possessors, gives 26.4% s-genitive for White South African English, 30.2% for British English and 37.4% for Afrikaans-first speakers of English. The author concludes that the Afrikaans constraint carries over to the second-language English of Afrikaans speakers, and that the regional English result is not clear evidence of contact.

Ideas

• I1. An animacy-based choice rule for the English genitive in en/src/lin.rs or the generator: a possessor with the animate feature takes the s-genitive, an inanimate one takes of, and the choice is logged with the feature that decided it. Keep the animacy values in the lexicon as an enum, not as strings.
• I2. Variety weights as a table: for each English variety, a weight for the inanimate s-genitive (for example British 30%, South African 26%, Afrikaans-first L2 37%, as reported in the paper). The generator picks variants by weight, using a fixed seed so runs are identical.
• I3. Negative control: shuffle the animacy labels across possessors. The rule's agreement with corpus choices must fall, otherwise the feature is not doing the work.
• I4. Parallel-text check: align a Mova English text with its translation into another language and count which genitive form the translator chose; use the paired counts as a test set, not as training data.

For Mova

The chapters are 11. Nouns (the possessive 's and the genitive), 22. Phrases: noun, adjective, adverb and prepositional phrases (noun phrase internal order and modifiers) and 08. National varieties (the South African and other varieties). The code is en/src/lin.rs (linearisation of the possessor) and en/src/dict.rs (animacy in the lexicon). The measures: agreement of the animacy rule with the paper's English figures (British 30.2%, South African 26.4% for inanimate s-genitives), run twice for determinism, and the shuffled-label negative control. The paper's parallel corpus is small (two novels), so Mova should use its own English counts for any evaluation.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.292

@article{rosenbach2017constraints,
  title = {{Constraints in contact: Animacy in English and Afrikaans genitive variation – a cross-linguistic perspective}},
  author = {Rosenbach, Anette},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.292},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.292}
}

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44. Submitted: 08 November 2016 find
45. Published: 04 August 2017 find
46. Copyright: © 2017 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS ↗

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