Abstract

ALMAZAN RUIZ, Encarnación. THE AGENTIVE GENITIVE AS THE MOST PROTOTYPICAL SEMANTIC INTERPRETATION IN ENGLISH: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY. Linguist.lit. [online]. 2021, n.79, pp.112-131.  Epub Nov 16, 2022. ISSN 0120-5587.  https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.lyl.n79a06.

The English genitive construction [NP’s + N] can be semantically interpreted in several ways, considering not only lexical and semantic factors but also pragmatic ones. The main aim of this paper is to state that the agentive genitive (John’s claim) is more frequent than the possessive (John’s car), despite what has been claimed traditionally. The corpus- based study demonstrates this fact analysing examples of genitive taken from two corpora: The Brown and the Lobtag. In addition to relating the agentive genitive to the nominalization process, a plausible explanation of the frequency of this semantic interpretation is provided.

Keywords : English genitive; nominalization; semantics; corpus linguistics.

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