چکیده:
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’.