A Study on the Internal Factors Influencing the Choice of English Genitive Structures

In modern English, genitive structures are divided into the prepositive genitive of s-genitive structure, the prepositive genitive of “N + N” structure and the postpositive genitive of of-genitive structure. The choice of prepositive or postpositive genitive depends on some internal and external factors or principles of language. Taking the English version of Report on the Work of the Government in 2019 as an example, this paper finds out that the main influencing factors are animacy, focus of the ending sentence, consistency of writing and hissing sound at the end of the word from the perspective of internal language analysis. Proper selection of these three types of genitive structures can make language expression more authentic and diversified.