Possessives and relevance

Possessives, Favorite, and Coercion

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 Vi...

45. Possessives and Relational Nouns

48. Possessives and relational nouns

This article concentrates on nominal possessives (John’s friend) rather than on verbal possessives (John has a friend). In John’s friend, John is the possessor, and friend describes the entity possessed (the possessee). Nominal possessives constitute a major construction type in the languages of the world. In contrast with a sortal noun (e.g., person), friend is a (two-place) relational noun: a...

Possessives in Context

Is there anything interesting to be said about the semantics of possessives? Consider the English Saxon genitive DP John’s dog. The meaning conveyed by this DP depends on the meaning of the nouns John and dog: the actual denotation of John’s dog cannot be determined unless the denotations of John and dog are known. Still, knowing the meaning of John’s dog does not amount simply to knowing who J...

Quantified possessives and direct compositionality

ing away from certain details, PW define an operation poss as in (15), which determines a determiner meaning, i.e. a 〈1,1〉 quantifier. In (15), Q is a 〈1〉 quantifier, Q a 〈1,1〉 quantifier, R the possessive relation, A,B any sets. (15) poss(Q,Q,R)(A,B)↔ Q(domA(R)∩{a : Q(Ra∩A,B)} Following this definition, the denotation of possessive ’s is given in (16). I use Q as a variable over 〈1〉 quantif...