Genitive and of-construction in modern written English. Processability and human involvement

On the basis of 698 instances of Saxon genitive and of-construction, the present paper explores the use of these modifiers from a corpus-linguistic perspective. In particular, the influence of the lexical class of the modifier, the semantic relationship expressed by the constructions, and weight and syntactic complexity is analysed. It will be argued that the variation of genitive and of-construction can be explained with regard to two major underlying factors, namely ‘processability' and ‘degree of human involvement'.