| Victorian Period is not only the mature period for fiction, but also the third zenith in English literature, therefore, there is great significance to study Victorian English novels to explore the linguistic characteristics in that period. The purpose of this thesis is to analyze one of the important linguistic features—genitive in Victorian English novels. It is intended to analyze the semantic and syntactic features of the genitive in Victorian English novel corpus (VENC) in comparison with the features of that in contemporary fiction writing (FICT).Carried out by FOXPRO and SPSS, a series of computation and tests of the genitive as well as some pertinent data are obtained. It is concluded that there exists significant difference for the genitive use in the two corpora;in VENC, of-phrase has been used far more frequently than s-genitive;and both s-genitive and of-phrase in Victorian English novels are used not only to express possession, but also used to denote subjective, objective, subjective complement, partitive, descriptive relations as well as measure, appositive and others. This paper tends to provide some objective and scientific data for future study on the genitive in novel language.
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