Investigating the ability of Iraqi university learners of English to recognize the semantics of the English’s genitive

Abstract EN

The marked genitive case as distinguished from the unmarked common one is one of the forms accompanied with the noun phrase in English to express grammatical / semantic relationships within sentences in texts.

In many instances in complex noun phrases, there is a similarity of function and meaning between ’s-genitive or a genitive construction and its equivalent with ‘of phrase’ or ‘of-construction’.

In many cases, the two forms are equivalent in meaning and are both perfectly acceptable, in other cases either the ’s-genitive or the of-construction is the only appropriate choice regarding the factors affecting the best choice.

The research aims at investigating the 2nd-year student’s ability to identify the exact meanings of the ’s-genitive constructions with its wide range of semantic interpretations which express some preferred meanings as possession, subjective, objective, descriptive, partitive, genitive of origin, genitive of close family relationships, measure and attribute.

It is hypothesized that the preferred meaning of s-genitive constructions is possessive, though it doesn’t apply adequately to all uses and meanings.

It is also hypothesized that the students are unaware of the patterns of variation and ambiguity in English ‘’s-genitive constructions’ which are pervasive and systematic.

To validate this hypothesis, a test is to be conducted.

It is a multi-choice test of the suitable ‘s-genitive meanings’ chosen from different grammar books.

The results of the test will be discussed and suggestions will be recommended on the lights of the results obtained after doing some statistical programmes.

It is concluded that the arbitrariness and ambiguity of some ‘s-genitive constructions’ make it difficult for the students to sententially paraphrase such constructions as the ‘s-genitive constructions’ are characteristically more compact and less explicit in meaning than the ‘of-constructions’.