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The genitive case in German is predominantly used to form noun modifiers (die Sehenswürdigkeiten [Hamburgs] ‘the sights of Hamburg’). Such genitive modifiers occur in a variety of different registers in German, and they have been claimed to be especially characteristic of non-proximal, written language. In many instances, they are interchangeable with diachronically younger prepositional phrases headed by von, with no noticeable impact on interpretation, thus giving rise to a genuine syntactic alternation phenomenon. There is an ongoing debate in the literature as to the distribution and function of these constructions. Based on corpus data from newspapers and internet discussion forums (approximately 15,000 noun phrases), we discuss semantic and syntactic conditions that limit the scope of this alternation. We then use a mixed-effects logistic regression model to examine a number of intra- and extralinguistic factors that bear on the choice of one construction over the other. We find that von-modifiers are used much less frequently than genitive modifiers overall, but there are grammatical niches in which they seem to thrive and, perhaps, even spread.
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