The common case and the genitive in noun modification: an area of confusion for Greek learners of English

Premodification of nouns by nouns is widely used in English and the formation of nominal compounds is a very productive feature of this language. New nomi­nal compounds are continuously being formed every day and in many cases noun modification by another noun in the common case is preferred either to the s- or the of- genitive. Greek learners of English, however, even at an advanced level, seem to experience great uncertainty in this area as evidenced by their written work. The purpose of this paper is to initiate a preliminary investigation into the types of errors made by students in the School of English, Aristotle University. To this end we will discuss the results from two elicitation tests as well as examples taken from samples of students' summary writing