IES Libertas. Torrevieja. Departamento de Inglés

ENGLISH LINGUISTICS, 1999

Compositionality in Formal Semantics, 2004

Background: Possessives and the argument-modifier distinction in NPs. Possessive constructions like John's teacher, John's team, John's cat, friend of John's offer an interesting test-bed for the argument-modifier distinction in NPs, both in English and cross-linguistically. Many, perhaps all, possessives seem to have some properties of arguments and some of modifiers, but some seem more argument-like and some more modifier-like. Recent proposals by Jensen and Vikner (1994), Vikner and Jensen (ms.1999), Partee and Borschev (1998), Borschev and Partee (1999a,b) analyze all possessives as argument-like, a conclusion we are no longer sure of. It is not easy to settle the question of whether there is a substantive difference between these two "roles" of possessives, and it may well be the case that all or many possessives play both roles at once. One central question about possessive constructions, then, is the following: Are all, some, or no possessives arguments of nouns, and if so, which ones (and how can we tell?), and of what kind, and at what 'level' of analysis? Within this larger question, we discuss here a relevant narrower question: Do predicate possessives provide strong evidence against a unified treatment of all possessives as arguments? 1.1. Possessives/genitives and related constructions. The terminology surrounding "possessives" and "genitives" is confusing, since the correspondences among morphological forms, syntactic positions, grammatical relations, and semantic interpretations are complex and debated, and vary considerably across languages. For clarification, let us distinguish at least the following: 2 a. Possessive pronouns: E. my, his; R. moj 'my', ego 'his'; E. predicative forms mine, his and postnominal forms of mine, of his.

Publication of the American Dialect Society, 1994

Most recent accounts of the possessive adjective or possessive pronoun in its determinative or genitive function (Huddleston; Leech and Svartvik; Quirk and Greenbaum; and Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik A Comprehensive Grammar) discuss the distribu tional characteristics of such forms as my, your, and our in terms of their prenominal position; further, these same accounts discuss the semantic features in terms of alienable and inalienable possession, or attribution and non-attribution. No account yet appears to provide information on the distinctive uses of at least two of the formsyour and our-from the perspective of their more unusual social functions in spoken and written English. Malinowski (1923), in his early work on primitive languages, makes the claim that "in its primitive uses, language functions as a link in concerted human activity, as a piece of human behaviour. It is a mode of action and not an instrument of reflection." According to Hudson: A nother use of speech is simply to establish or reinforce social relations-what Malinowski called PHATIC COMMUNION, the kind of chitchat that people engage in simply in order to show that they recognise each other's presence. We might add many other uses of speech to this list-speech to obtain. .. informa tion. .. for expressing em otions. .. for its own sake. .. and so on. [109-10]

Language, 2013

We investigate what possessives mean by examining a wide range of English examples, preand postnominal, quantified and nonquantified, to arrive at general, systematic truth conditions for them. In the process, we delineate a rich class of paradigmatic possessives having crosslinguistic interest, exploiting characteristic semantic properties. One is that all involve (implicit or explicit) quantification over possessed entities. Another is that this quantification always carries existential import, even when the quantifier over possessed entities itself does not. We show that this property, termed possessive existential import, is intimately related to the notion of narrowing (Barker 1995). Narrowing has implications for compositionally analyzing possessives' meaning. We apply the proposed semantics to the issues of the definiteness of possessives, negation of possessives, partitives and prenominal possessives, postnominal possessives and complements of relational nouns, freedom of the possessive relation, and the semantic relationship between pre-and postnominal possessives.*

2009

Typological Studies in Language, 2008

1983

Nordic Journal of English Studies, 2009

This study is a corpus-based analysis of the verbs own and possess, which are two of the verbs that are used to express possession and ownership in English. The results show that there are areas of overlapping use as well as areas where only one of the two is a valid option. It has also been shown that own has a legal feature at its core and is predominantly used to express ownership. The most frequent usage of possess, on the other hand, is that of describing that someone or something has a quality or property of some kind. This difference also has consequences for what kinds of entities appear as the subject and object arguments of the verbs.