Open Access

Kristin Kopf

• Dieses Kapitel untersucht die Stellung adnominaler Genitive im Deutschen. Die Stellungsvariation besteht fast ausschließlich für artikellose Eigennamen, weshalb diese im Zentrum der Analyse stehen. Auf Basis von Korpusdaten kann gezeigt werden, dass die Faktoren Belebtheit und Länge des Attributs sowie Kasus der Gesamtphrase einen großen Teil der Variation erklären.
• Adnominal genitives in German usually appear in postnominal position (der Eingang des Gebäudes ‘the entrance of the building’). However, a specific subset, i. e. proper names, can also be found prenominally (Hamburgs Sehenswürdigkeiten ‘Hamburg’s sights’ as well as die Sehenswürdigkeiten Hamburgs ‘the sights of Hamburg’). The present corpus study uses logistic regression to evaluate how this alternation phenomenon is influenced by the following factors: 1. Animacy: Prenominal position is more likely for personal names than for names of human collectives and place names. We consider this an indirect result of the higher importance and agentivity of referents of animate nouns, but we suggest that grammatical properties specific to name type bear an additional influence on genitive placement. 2. Case: Prenominal position is more likely if the noun phrase as a whole has nominative case compared to all other cases. This might be a strategy to reduce ambiguity for non-default cases or an effect of Rohdenburg’s (1996) complexity principle. 3. Length: Prenominal position is more likely if the genitive noun has few syllables. This is in line with a general tendency to place heavier constituents after the head noun. The factors decade (1990’s, 2000’s, 2010’s) and text type/medium (newspapers vs. internet forums) could not be shown to influence the distribution, there is thus no evidence for ongoing change.