In a European context, where member states of the European Union share a common language policy, multilingualism and foreign language (FL) learning are strongly promoted. The goal is that citizens learn two FLs in addition to their first language(s) (L1). However, it is unclear to what extent the multilingual policy is relevant in people's lives, at a time when the English language is established as a lingua franca. This survey-based study contributes insights into the relevance of the EU multilingual policy in an intra-European migration context, by focusing on Swedish migrants (n = 199) in France, who are L1 speakers of Swedish. We investigated the perceived importance of skills in FL French, FL English, and L1 Swedish, for professional and personal life. The quantitative analyses showed that participants perceive skills in French and in English to be equally important for professional life, whereas skills in Swedish were perceived to be less important. For personal life, skills in French were perceived as the most important, followed by skills in English, and then Swedish. In conclusion, the European multilingual language policy appears to be reflected in Europeans' lives, at least in the case of Swedish migrants in France.

This paper will report the findings of a study that has investigated spoken English as a lingua franca (ELF) usage in Swedish higher education. The material comprises digital recordings of lectures and student group-work sessions, all being naturally occurring, authentic high-stakes spoken exchange, i.e. from non-language-teaching contexts. The aim of the present paper, which constitutes a part of a larger study, has been to investigate the role pragmatic strategies play in the communicative effectiveness of English as a lingua franca. The paper will document types of pragmatic strategies as well as point to important differences between the two speech event types and the implications of these differences for English-medium education. The findings show that lecturers in ELF settings make less frequent use of pragmatic strategies than students who deploy these strategies frequently in group-work sessions. Earlier stages of the present study (Bjorkman, 2008a, 2008b, 2009) showed that despite frequent non-standardness in the morphosyntax level, there is little overt disturbance in student group-work, and it is highly likely that a variety of pragmatic strategies that students deploy prevents some disturbance. It is reasonable to assume that, in the absence of appropriate pragmatic strategies used often in lectures, there is an increased risk for covert disturbance.

This paper reports on an analysis of the communicative strategies (CSs) used by speakers in spoken lingua franca English (ELF) in an academic setting. The purpose of the work has primarily been to outline the CSs used in polyadic ELF speech which are used to ensure communication effectiveness in consequential situations and to present a framework that shows the different communicative functions of a number of CSs. The data comprise fifteen group sessions of naturally occurring student group-work talk in content courses at a technical university. Detailed qualitative analyses have been carried out, resulting in a framework of the communication strategies used by the speakers. The methodology here provides us with a taxonomy of CSs in natural ELF interactions. The results show that other than explicitness strategies, comprehension checks, confirmation checks and clarification requests were frequently employed CSs in the data. There were very few instances of self and other-initiated word replacement, most likely owing to the nature of the high-stakes interactions where the focus is on the task and not the language. The results overall also show that the speakers in these ELF interactions employed other-initiated strategies as frequently as self-initiated communicative strategies.

The research project Simulating intonational varieties of Swedish (SIMULEKT) aims to gain more precise and thorough knowledge about some major regional varieties of Swedish: South, Göta, Svea, Gotland, Dala, North, and Finland Swedish. In this research effort, the Swedish prosody model and different forms of speech synthesis play a prominent role. The two speech databases SweDia 2000 and SpeechDat constitute our main material for analysis. As a first test case for our prosody model, we compared Svea and North Swedish intonation in a pilot production-oriented perception test. Näi{dotless}ve Swedish listeners were asked to identify the most Svea and North sounding stimuli. Results showed that listeners can differentiate between the two varieties from intonation only. They also provided information on how intonational parameters affect listeners' impression of Swedish varieties. All this indicates that our experimental method can be used to test perception of different regional varieties of Swedish.

Feedback provided by peer reviewers plays a pivotal role in any journal peer-review model. Peer-review feedback helps authors reconsider their manuscripts in a new light and improve their work before it is published. While there is a wealth of knowledge and empirical evidence focusing on effective feedback practices in educational settings, there is a dearth of research on journal peer-review feedback, especially in some academic disciplines including the social sciences and education. To better understand ‘good’ and ‘bad’ peer-review feedback practices across academic disciplines, we conducted a systematic literature review, informed by grounded theory, that aimed to identify the feedback features and factors that exert an impact on quality of peer-review feedback. Findings from 20 publications indicate a list of good and bad features of peer-review feedback pertaining to content, language, tone, structure and timeliness. We also identified a number of internal and external factors that influence how peer reviewers provide feedback such as academics’ expertise, language skills, motivation and seniority, as well as external influences such as anonymity in peer-review, and interactions between editors and peer reviewers. Implications for researching and practising peer-review are discussed.

In a realistic wireless environment, the multi-antenna channel usually exhibits spatially correlated fading. This is more emphasized when a large number of antennas is densely deployed, known as holographic massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output). In the first part of this letter, we develop a channel model for holographic massive MIMO by considering both non-isotropic scattering and directive antennas. With a large number of antennas, it is difficult to obtain full knowledge of the spatial correlation matrix. In this case, channel estimation is conventionally done using the least-squares (LS) estimator that requires no prior information of the channel statistics or array geometry. In the second part of this letter, we propose a novel channel estimation scheme that exploits the array geometry to identify a subspace of reduced rank that covers the eigenspace of any spatial correlation matrix. The proposed estimator outperforms the LS estimator, without using any user-specific channel statistics.

This study investigated what psychological and social factors predict ‘perceived nativelikeness’ in late second language (L2) learners of French (L1 Swedish) (N = 62) with a minimum length of residence (LOR) of 5 years in France. The included factors were: language aptitude (LLAMA), acculturation (VIA), personality (MPQ), target language engagement and social networks (number of relations in L2). LOR and Length of French studies were also included as extraneous variables. Multiple linear regression analyses showed that positive effects were found for LLAMA D (sound recognition), acculturation (VIA France and VIA Sweden), number of relations in L2 and LOR. A negative effect was found for the personality variable Social initiative. The strongest effects were found for LLAMA D, Social initiative and LOR. All variables together explained 25% (adjusted R²) of the variance in the sample, which represents medium-sized effects in relation to other studies on individual factors. In sum, these findings confirm results from earlier studies on the importance of language aptitude and acculturation in late L2 acquisition. They also add evidence of the importance of personality, social networks, and LOR. On a more general note psychological and social factors combine to explain different outcomes in adult L2 acquisition, although the effects of psychological variables are deemed somewhat stronger. 

A detailed description of the discourse context of a word can be used for predicting word pronunciation in discourse context and also enables studies of the interplay between various types of information on e.g. phone-level pronunciation. The work presented in this paper is aimed at modelling systematic variation in the phone-level realisation of words inherent to a language variety. A data-driven approach based on access to detailed discourse context descriptions is used. The discourse context descriptions are constructed through annotation of spoken language with a large variety of linguistic and related variables in multiple layers. Decision tree pronunciation models are induced from the annotation. The effects of using different types and different amounts of information for model induction are explored. Models generated in a tenfold cross-validation experiment produce on average 8.2% errors on the phone level when they are trained on all available information. Models trained on phoneme level information only have an average phone error rate of 14.2%. This means that including information above the phoneme level in the context description can improve model performance by 42.2%.

We want  to present an example of how  to integrate language  for specific purposes (LSP) in language courses for engineers through collaborative online international activities (COIL). These activities are implemented in a flipped classroom (FC) and blended learning format (BL) which gives flexibility and enables online projects. COIL activities are particularly well suited for LSP as it offers a student-owned, authentic and engaging way to practice language skills. COIL activities can be defined as project-based learning where the context defines the learning tasks. In that way, students develop deep content knowledge: collaboration, communication skills including e-communication, intercultural competence, which prepare them for professional situations. We  will  share  examples  based  on  COIL  activities  developed  in  courses  of  French  and  German  for engineering  students,  from  A2  to  B2  levels.  By  sharing  these  practices,  we  hope  to  inspire  other teachers and develop more COIL projects.

Multilingualism is an asset in an increasingly interconnected and linguistically diverse world. It promotes linguisticflexibility, cultural sensitivity and cognitive flexibility, as well as the ability to think from various perspectives. Alongsidethe dominance of English, multilingualism is prevalent in many workplaces within the globally operating tech sector. Amultilingual environment requires strategies and skills such as code-switching, transfer, and mediation.The Royal Institute of technology (KTH) at Stockholm, Sweden, offers an international learning environment with a largenumber of international students and academic staff. Furthermore, many students already are multilingual but may notbe prepared to use their multilingual competences in an academic or professional context. Enhancing andstrengthening student’s multilingual competences is an asset, also in the “Anglosphere”. Multilingualism opens doors toa broader professional network by bridging language and cultural barriers. It also enhances problem solving as diverselinguistic and cultural knowledge helps to develop innovative solutions and adapt to different contexts.The department of language and communication at KTH is constantly seeking new teaching and learning methods thatmeet the evolving needs of students and society. This development can entail shifting from more traditional “languagecourses” and offering other ways of learning and practicing languages through skill-based courses, project-basedcourses or workshops and challenge driven education. It implies also new formats of teaching and learning, as blendedlearning and teaching, flipped classroom and collaborative learning (COIL).In this presentation, we will describe our ongoing work with diversifying and renewing language teaching at KTH byintroducing a multilingual course. Our aim is to enhance students’ multilingual competences, preparing them to work inmultilingual, multidisciplinary and multicultural working environments.

Todays globalized world demands successful communication with an increasing diversity of people - from different fields, background and cultures. Intercultural competence is increasingly recognized as an essential skill, especially for engineering graduates who, throughout their professional career, will work in global teams and play an important part in international communities.     In the Department of Languages and Communication at KTH, students can opt/take/add for additional courses to develop their core communication skills,  e.g. scientific writing, rhetoric, foreign languages, and Global competence. The language courses focus on language for professional use in the technology sector. For this reason/accordingly the course offerings at the Department of Languages and Communication aim to prepare the students for a professional career in international contexts, hence communicating in different languages and communicating with others is playing an important role in being a citizen of today’s world.   In the language courses for engineers, we have implemented different methodologies such as collaborative learning, tandem-learning, workshops, visits to technological museums and companies, and virtual Industrial Visits. Integrating these learning activities has different impacts on the course, the teacher, and the students. A course with integrated collaborative international tasks implies changes both in the pedagogic approach of a course, the role of the teacher, and the student’s learning outcome. Using methodologies like collaborative learning as a pedagogical approach in language teaching for engineering students enhance the students'' skills in cross-cultural communication while linking their technological knowledge, with being respectful of multilingualism.  In our presentation, we want to map these impacts on students and teachers in relation to our experiences. We also aim to share best practice on how we integrate international collaborative tasks in language courses for engineers, as a virtual mobility experience. Rethinking our teaching practices in order to facilitate cross-cultural communication through students’ discipline-specific academic language and literacy development to meet the challenges of the increased internationalization and diversity in higher education.   We will show a variety of collaborative activities offered in language courses - French, Japanese and German - as well as in courses in professional communication.  These activities provide students with an opportunity to interact with peers at technical universities and professionals, so they can develop intercultural competences and language skills while working together on subject-specific learning tasks.

Spontaneous speech synthesis is a complex enterprise, as the data has large variation, as well as speech disfluencies nor-mally omitted from read speech. These disfluencies perturb the attention mechanism present in most Text to Speech (TTS) sys-tems. Explicit modelling of prosodic features has enabled intu-itive prosody modification of synthesized speech. Most pros-ody-controlled TTS, however, has been trained on read-speech data that is not representative of spontaneous conversational prosody. The diversity in prosody in spontaneous speech data allows for more wide-ranging data-driven modelling of pro-sodic features. Additionally, prosody-controlled TTS requires extensive training data and GPU time which limits accessibil-ity. We use neural HMM TTS as it reduces the parameter size and can achieve fast convergence with stable alignments for spontaneous speech data. We modify neural HMM TTS to ena-ble prosodic control of the speech rate and fundamental fre-quency. We perform subjective evaluation of the generated speech of English and Swedish TTS models and objective eval-uation for English TTS. Subjective evaluation showed a signif-icant improvement in naturalness for Swedish for the mean prosody compared to a baseline with no prosody modification, and the objective evaluation showed greater variety in the mean of the per-utterance prosodic features.

Polish presents an interesting case for testing alternative phonetic implementations of prominence: It has fixed lexical stress on the penultimate, it has been difficult to classify within the classic ‘stress-timing’ vs. ‘syllable-timing’ dichotomy [1, 2, inter alia] and its stress is regarded as ‘weakly expressed’ [3]. We investigate acoustic correlates of Polish prominence patterns in a corpus of spontaneous, task-oriented dialogue. Results indicate clear differences to prior analyses of more controlled data, with intensity but also duration and pitch movement being main indicators of prominence.

We examine the dynamics of VOT in Polish stops under lexical stress and focus. We elicit real Polish words containing voiced and voiceless stop+/a/ syllables in primary, secondary and unstressed, as well as focus positions. We also correlate VOT with speech rate estimated on the basis of equisyllabic word length. Our results show that the relationships between prosody and VOT are consistent with the status of Polish as a true voicing language.

Tertiary education in many countries is increasingly bilingual, with English used in parallel with the national language, particularly as a reading language. This article describes the results of a survey of student attitudes toward, and reading practices regarding, English language textbooks. Over 1,000 students at three Swedish universities responded to a questionnaire asking about their experiences with English textbooks. Textbooks written in English were generally unpopular, and the perception was widespread that they placed a greater burden on students. However, respondents were divided about whether their reading behavior and their learning outcomes were affected by having a textbook in English, and about whether English texts were desirable. The findings of this study have implications for teaching practices in contexts in which students are asked to read, or are being prepared to read, in a second language. Implications for the English as a foreign language or English as a second language classroom are discussed.

The repetition of words, lexical repetition, can be an important marker of cohesion in writing, especially in domains where precision and clarity are valued. Contemporary writing in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) is a such a domain. Nevertheless, lexical repetition is sometimes instinctively misunderstood as a feature of an exaggerated style or simplistic language use. 

Using a classification system inspired by both previous research on lexical cohesion and the specific needs and characteristics of STEM writing, I have analysed 15 project proposals written by STEM students at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. The sample is small but representative of KTH’s student population in terms of gender, linguacultural background, and years of academic experience. I examined the students’ ways of using and avoiding lexical repetition when referring to key concepts and also reviewed each text with its author(s) in a semi-structured interview. My aim was to understand the students’ perceptions of lexical repetition as STEM writers and English users. 

 Results of the text analysis show that the more experienced student writers frequently chose lexical repetition to refer to key concepts, and that the less experienced student writers tended to use more paraphrases and pronouns instead. This finding challenges the notion that lexical repetition is a feature of inappropriate or simplistic language use. Results of the interviews show that some students were previously discouraged from repeating lexical items in writing. However, they mostly recognised the value of lexical repetition in STEM writing to avoid ambiguity and ensure inter-sentential cohesion. 

 A second round of text collection and interviews will begin this summer with a focus on newly arrived international students. For the WRAB VI conference, I would like to compare the results of the two rounds of data collection and share some insights from the interviews.

This study is an empirical investigation of both the distribution of the specific direct object marker rā in restrictive relative clauses in spoken Farsi and the degrees of acceptance of different patterns of this structure among 50 Farsi speakers. Examples of the target structure are taken from modern films and a spoken translation test and then used in an acceptability judgement test. The findings show that there is a considerable disparity between the written relative clauses studied in previous research and spoken versions of the same structure. More specifically, the findings in this study show that the omission of the rā marker is common, that the use of rā-marked referent pronouns no longer seems to be an acceptable feature of spoken Farsi, and that the use of the rā marker and the judgement of its acceptability change according to the syntactic function(s) of the head noun phrase.

LSP teachers working at KTH Royal Institute of Technology have created a guide to scientific writing in English. This is an online resource that aims to raise awareness of what constitutes effective scientific writing.

The guide emerged from interactions between LSP teachers and their students and faculty colleagues on the nature of effective scientific writing in English. As a result, and in contrast to many other university writing guides, the KTH guide is rooted in the typical writing genres and conventions of a technical university, and draws on examples of these to explore sentence structure, punctuation, text flow, and scientific style. 

Since its launch, the guide has become an integral part of classroom practice, and it has drawn a number of comments from students and faculty colleagues in anonymized surveys and course evaluations. Our analysis of these comments suggests that users appreciate the focus on scientific writing (as opposed to more general academic writing), but that some struggle to find answers to specific questions. 

In this paper, we introduce the guide, present a thematic analysis of the evaluations, and discuss the impact of these on the development of not only the guide, but also on scientific writing practices at KTH.

This paper describes the use of connectionist techniques in phonetic speech recognition with strong latency constraints. The constraints are imposed by the task of deriving the lip movements of a synthetic face in real time from the speech signal, by feeding the phonetic string into an articulatory synthesiser. Particular attention has been paid to analysing the interaction between the time evolution model learnt by the multi-layer perceptrons and the transition model imposed by the Viterbi decoder, in different latency conditions. Two experiments were conducted in which the time dependencies in the language model (LM) were controlled by a parameter. The results show a strong interaction between the three factors involved, namely the neural network topology, the length of time dependencies in the LM and the decoder latency.

We analyse the behaviour of Incremental Model-Based Clustering on child-directed speech data, and suggest a possible use of this method to describe the acquisition of phonetic classes by an infant. The effects of two factors are analysed, namely the number of coefficients describing the speech signal, and the frame length of the incremental clustering procedure. The results show that, although the number of predicted clusters vary in different conditions, the classifications obtained are essentially consistent. Different classifications were compared using the variation of information measure.

This paper describes SynFace, a supportive technology that aims at enhancing audio-based spoken communication in adverse acoustic conditions by providing the missing visual information in the form of an animated talking head. Firstly, we describe the system architecture, consisting of a 3D animated face model controlled from the speech input by a specifically optimised phonetic recogniser. Secondly, we report on speech intelligibility experiments with focus on multilinguality and robustness to audio quality. The system, already available for Swedish, English, and Flemish, was optimised for German and for Swedish wide-band speech quality available in TV, radio, and Internet communication. Lastly, the paper covers experiments with nonverbal motions driven from the speech signal. It is shown that turn-taking gestures can be used to affect the flow of human-human dialogues. We have focused specifically on two categories of cues that may be extracted from the acoustic signal: prominence/emphasis and interactional cues (turn-taking/back-channelling).

Associative adjectives such as in electrical engineer differ from ascriptive adjectives like in red house: They are syntactically similar, yet they do not denote an intersective sense like ascriptive adjectives do. However, associative adjectives may (irregularly) denote ascriptive traits connected to the associated entity: The more semantically-similar two entities are, the more regular the traits are which are ascribed to them through association by a given adjective. This model of entities associated through family membership is analogous to a semantic network based on relative word similarities, in which families appear as clusters of relatively-similar entities.

This thesis comprises investigations of the perceptual consequences of children’s misarticulated speech – as perceived by clinicians, by everyday listeners, and by the children themselves. By inviting methods from other areas to the study of speech disorders, this work demonstrates some successful cases of cross-fertilization. The population in focus is children with a phonological disorder (PD), who misarticulate /t/ and /k/. A theoretical assumption underlying this work is that errors in speech production are often paralleled in perception, e.g. that children base their decision on whether a speech sound is a /t/ or a /k/ on other acoustic-phonetic criteria than those employed by proficient language users. This assumption, together with an aim at stimulating self-monitoring in these children, motivated two of the included studies. Through these studies, new insights into children’s perception of their own speech were achieved – insights entailing both clinical and psycholinguistic implications. For example, the finding that children with PD generally recognize themselves as the speaker in recordings of their own utterances lends support to the use of recordings in therapy, to attract children’s attention to their own speech production. Furthermore, through the introduction of a novel method for automatic correction of children’s speech errors, these findings were extended with the observation that children with PD tend to evaluate misarticulated utterances as correct when just having produced them, and to perceive inaccuracies better when time has passed. Another theme in this thesis is the gradual nature of speech perception related to phonological categories, and a concern that perceptual sensitivity is obscured in descriptions based solely on discrete categorical labels. This concern is substantiated by the finding that listeners rate “substitutions” of [t] for /k/ as less /t/-like than correct productions of [t] for intended /t/. Finally, a novel method of registering listener reactions during the continuous playback of misarticulated speech is introduced, demonstrating a viable approach to exploring how different speech errors influence intelligibility and/or acceptability. By integrating such information in the prioritizing of therapeutic targets, intervention may be better directed at those patterns that cause the most problems for the child in his or her everyday life.

The topic of the present investigation is the perceptual and acoustic nature of children’s successful and unsuccessful efforts at producing /t/ and /k/, with a specific aim at exploring perceptual sensitivity to phonetic detail, and the extent to which this sensitivity is reflected in the acoustic domain. Recordings were collected from children with a speech sound disorder (SSD), who misarticulated one of the target plosives. These recordings were compared to correct productions recorded from children with typical speech development (TD). Perceptual responses were registered with regards to a visual-analogue scale, ranging from “clear [t]” to “clear [k]”. Acoustic features were described by means of spectral moments and discrete cosine transformation analysis. The perceptual evaluation showed that “clear substitutions” of [t] for /k/, as well as of [k] for /t/, were rated as being less prototypical than correct productions. Hence, human listeners exhibit perceptual sensitivity to covert contrast. Moreover, even among target-appropriate productions of /t/ and /k/, items produced by children with SSD were rated as less prototypical than those produced by TD peers. Although both acoustic analysis methods discriminated between the gross categories /t/ and /k/, none of them exhibited the same sensitivity to phonetic detail as the human listeners.

We explore children's perception of their own speech - in its online form, in its recorded form, and in synthetically modified forms. Children with phonological disorder (PD) and children with typical speech and language development (TD) performed tasks of evaluating accuracy of the different types of speech stimuli, either immediately after having produced the utterance or after a delay. In addition, they performed a task designed to assess their ability to detect synthetic modification. Both groups showed high performance in tasks involving evaluation of other children's speech, whereas in tasks of evaluating one's own speech, the children with PD were less accurate than their TD peers. The children with PD were less sensitive to misproductions in immediate conjunction with their production of an utterance, and more accurate after a delay. Within-category modification often passed undetected, indicating a satisfactory quality of the generated speech. Potential clinical benefits of using corrective re-synthesis are discussed.

Since more and more customers switch to online purchases, the last-mile delivery problemhas created a huge burden on companies and cities. The increasing parcel delivery leads toextra operational costs in logistics and congestion in cities. IKEA, the furniture retailcompany, is going to propose a project – IKEA Urban Multi Hub to solve this problem byallowing customers to carry back orders themselves. This study collaborates with IKEA toinvestigate and formulate a robust hub that customers are willing to visit. The aim of thisresearch is to identify appropriate locations for the hub and possible future mobility that thehub should provide. Moreover, develop concepts and strategies for two cities - Shanghai cityand New York City.Research and customer interview were fundamental parts of this project. The research partincludes literature review and background that helps to preliminary clarify urban conditions,possible future mobility, and travel behavior. The customer interview part investigatescustomers’ preferences in two selected cities which helps to realize their needs and gaininspiration. The results showed that clustering with metro stations and providingautonomous mobility may create a smooth customer self-delivery experience for IKEA UrbanMulti Hub. Besides, cooperating with logistic companies can reduce the operation risk of theHub and strengthen the business model. Further concepts and strategies developed for twoselected cities are described in the thesis.

Neural machine translation (NMT) architectures have achieved promising results for automatic program repair. Yet, they have the limitation of generating low-quality patches (e.g., not compilable patches). This is because the existing works only optimize a purely syntactic loss function based on characters and tokens without incorporating program-specific information during neural network weight optimization. In this paper, we propose a novel program repair model called RewardRepair. The core novelty of RewardRepair is to improve NMT-based program repair with a loss function based on program compilation and test execution information, rewarding the network to produce patches that compile and that do not overfit. We conduct several experiments to evaluate RewardRepair showing that it is feasible and effective to use compilation and test execution results to optimize the underlying neural repair model. RewardRepair correctly repairs 207 bugs over four benchmarks. we report on repair success for 121 bugs that are fixed for the first time in the literature. Also, RewardRepair produces up to 45.3% of compilable patches, an improvement over the 39% by the state-of-the-art.

This study deals with variation between possessive/genitive and objective/plain forms of the subject of the verbal gerund clause (VGC) in Present-day and Late Modern British English, as in Would you object to my [me] paying her a visit? and Poor timing of spoonfuls can lead to the child’s [the child] feeling frustrated. According to the traditional prescriptivist view, the possessive/genitive form is the preferred variant. The aim of the present study is to explore to what extent possessive/genitive and objective/plain forms are used as subjects of VGCs, and to see what factors influence the variation.The study consists of synchronic and diachronic analyses. The synchronic data, drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC), represents four genres: Academic Prose, Fiction, News and Conversation. The diachronic data comprises collections of novels from the periods 1751–1800, 1851–1900 and 1960–1993 (the BNC Fiction genre). In addition to univariate analyses, multivariate analyses are performed in order to discover what factors carry more importance than others.When the VGC subject is a personal pronoun, e.g. my or me, genre plays a crucial role, with the proportion of possessives being conspicuously high in Academic Prose and significantly lower in the other genres. Regarding NPs other than personal pronouns, genre is not as important a factor; instead, the function of the VGC in the superordinate clause and linguistic factors such as animacy and the singular/plural distinction are also salient in determining variation.Moreover, results reveal that in the periods 1751–1800 and 1851–1900, the possessive form of a personal pronoun is the unchallenged norm, whereas the use of the possessive decreases considerably between the second and third periods. Genitive and plain-case forms of other NPs are evenly distributed in the first period; after that, the genitive is only used in certain contexts.