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Abstract

The article explores the variation between the possessive prepositional construction and the s-genitive in Danish with respect to five factors: animacy, definiteness, type of possessive relation, givenness, and length. The goal is to establish if and in what way these factors influence the selection between the two adnominal possessive constructions. The study is based on a newly compiled corpus of contemporary Danish texts, namely, literary, press, and blog texts. The corpus consists of over 114,000 word tokens. The material is studied quantitatively; the chi-square test of independence is used to determine whether there is a significant association between the studied factors and the possessive construction, and the classification and regression tree analysis is used to determine the relative importance of each factor. The results indicate that animacy, type of possessive relation, and definiteness especially significantly contribute to the selection between the prepositional construction and the s-genitive. The prepositional construction is favored when the possessor phrase referent is inanimate and indefinite. It is also more frequent with expressions of possession that involve a part–whole relationship (although only with an inanimate possessor referent) and locative possession.