The oblique genitive in English

The English oblique genitive construction, illustrated by examples such as a friend of the Prime Minister’s, has variously been analysed as a conditioned variant of the subject-determiner construction (the Prime Minister’s friend), as a conditioned variant of the of-oblique (a friend of the Prime Minister), or as an equivalent of the partitive (one of the Prime Minister’s friends). Alternatively, the oblique genitive has also been treated as an independent construction which in different ways competes with the rest. In this paper, using both the British National Corpus and web-based examples, we examine the extent of variation permitted by the oblique genitive, and conclude that its treatment as an independent construction is the correct one.