Identifying alternations in historical corpus data: the genitive alternation in Old English

This article revisits the diachrony of the genitive alternation, the alternation between ’s and prepositional phrases headed by of in Present-Day English. It is usually assumed to have developed around 1400CE. For Old English (c.650CE–1000CE), a different alternation between pre-modifying and post-modifying genitive-case marked noun phrases is suggested to be the genitive alternation. Building on descriptions of competition between genitive-case marked noun phrases (GEN) and prepositional phrases with of (OF) in Old English, and unpicking some of the preconceptions about the alternation in Old English, we propose a bottom-up method for systematically identifying possible alternation between OF and GEN in the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (Taylor et al. 2003). Our findings indicate that there is plausibly an alternation in Old English that stands in continuity with Present-Day English, and suggest a more complex diachrony for the alternation characterized by continuity and discontinuity in the alternants and the envelope of variation.