속격표시어 ’s 사용의 불확실성

Abstract

The prescriptive genitive rule using the genitive marker 's is so simple but the variety of genitivized nouns in the genitive compounds in written American English is so confusing in the actual use that it seems the genitive rule itself is no longer kept. This paper provides the distributional tendencies of the use of the genitive marker 's by analysing the total 9,171 genitivized nouns in 'local' genitive compounds, divided into 5 semantic categories, such as surnames, personal common nouns, place names, temporal names and others. Somewhat surprisingly by far the highest frequency rate was observed among the surname category, which overwhelmingly accounted for 83% of all tokens, the personal common nouns and place nouns both about 8%, and temporal nouns 1%. The non-prescriptive use comprising 71% with missing apostrophe and common case forms represents more than twice than the prescriptive use 29% with genitive marker 's. Common case forms have a higher distribution in all the categories except personal common nouns, most frequent in prescriptive use of 's. These findings reflect that the declining genitive marker 's is not a hard and fast rule any more in the contemporary written American English and that they should be noted and reconsidered in the use of the genitive marker 's in English genitive grammar.