3.1.2 Text frequency of the possessor head

According to Osselton (1988), inanimate nouns such as sound and soil would normally not occur with the s-genitive. However, when these nouns are frequently mentioned in the context, then they will more likely take the s-genitive. These are what Osselton calls “thematic genitives. Hinrichs and Szmrecsanyi (2007) support this idea with the help of a corpus analysis. Hinrichs and Szmrecsanyi (2007: 451) select a sentence from the Frown corpus:

“The bill’s supporters said they still expected Senate approval of the complex and sweeping energy package, which would mark the first major overhaul of U.S energy policy in more than a decade.” <Frown A02>

Hinrichs and Szmrecsanyi (2007) find out that the possessor head noun the bill has a text frequency of 32 occurrences out of the approximately 2000 words in Frown text A02. Combining results found in other corpora, Hinrichs and Szmrecsanyi (2007) calculate that the s-genitive has a frequency of 5.94 occurrences per 2000 word sample, while the of-genitive has a frequency of 3.88 occurrences per 2000 words. The result accords with Osselton’s (1988) idea.

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