Abstract
What are the scope and limits of syntactic variation within and across varieties of English? To address this question, we investigate well-known syntactic variation between the s-genitive (Mr Barnsley’s management) and the of-genitive (the management of Mr Barnsley) in nine varieties of English. We specifically gauge the stability of constraints on this variation by analyzing a richly annotated dataset spanning 10,558 interchangeable genitives from nine components of the International Corpus of English. Regression modeling indicates that constraints such as
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