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© Cambridge University Press 2014. This chapter is concerned with the development of two competing NP constructions in Late Modern English (LModE), the s-genitive, as in (1), and the of-genitive, as in (2). (1) before [the Seneschal]s [Brother] could arrive, he was secured by the Governor of Newport (2) the Duke of Norfolk, having lately received another Challenge from [theBrother] of [the Seneschal], went to the place appointed Historically speaking, the of-genitive is, of course, the incoming form, which appeared during the ninth century. According to Thomas (1931: 284), the inflected genitive vastly outnumbered the periphrasis with of up until the twelfth century. In the Middle English period, we begin to witness ‘a strong tendency to replace the inflectional genitive by periphrastic constructions, above all by periphrasis with the preposition of’ (Mustanoja 1960, I: 70). The Early Modern English period, however, sees a revival of the s-genitive, ‘against all odds’ (Rosenbach 2002: 184). While we know that the s-genitive is comparatively - and increasingly - popular in Present-Day English (PDE), especially American English (Rosenbach 2002, 2003), the literature about genitive variability in the LModE period is somewhat sketchy (but see Szmrecsanyi 2013; Wolk et al. 2013). In addressing these gaps in our knowledge about genitive variability in LModE, we follow recent probabilistic approaches to language (see, for example, the papers in Bod et al. 2003; Bresnan and Ford 2010) and assume that grammatical variation and change is sensitive to probabilistic (rather than categorical) constraints, because conditioning factors may influence linguistic choice-making in extremely subtle, stochastic ways (Bresnan and Hay 2008: 246). In this spirit, we are interested in subtle changes in some conditioning factors. Specifically, we provide evidence for a diachronic weakening of the animacy constraint, for which we offer various explanations, paying particular attention to a rather novel source of change in the distributional pattern of variants: changes in the wider cultural context, such as industrialisation as a transformational period (we would thus like to emphasise right at the outset that the present study is not about e.g. cultural transmission and iterative learning).