158 Benedikt Szmrecsanyi
subclusters is more homogeneous, containing 1990s British editorials (F-
LOB-B) as well as the remainder of the American material (Brown-B,
Frown-A). In all, Figure 2 makes amply clear that the most fundamental
split – as indicated by the distance from the leaves to the encompassing
node – in the dataset occurs between the written and the spoken material,
which testifies to the paramount importance of the written-spoken distinc-
tion for the exact quantitative shape of a given system of genitive choice.
This distinction overrides all other language-external factors.
Figure 3. MDS visualization of the log-transformed 10 × 9 odds ratio matrix in
Table 1. Group memberships derive from hierarchical agglomerative
cluster analysis (cf. Figure 2). Arrows indicate drifts in real time
The dendrogram in Figure 2 has provided us with a first impression of the
similarities and dissimilarities between genitive choice systems as exhibited
in our dataset. For the remainder of this section, we will rely on multidi-
mensional scaling to visualize the hidden structure of genitive variation in