The semantics of possessives

Bibliographic Data

ID3003196
AuthorsStanley Peters (0000-0003-4920-3506), Dag Westerståhl (0000-0002-9925-3811)
Year2013
Volume89
Issue4
Pages713-759
Publication date2013-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLanguage (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0097-8507 • E-ISSN: 1535-0665
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/lan.2013.0065
OpenAlexW2128397085
LanguageEN
Citations received20
References cited17

We investigate what possessives mean by examining a wide range of English examples, pre-and 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

Definiteness · Epistemology · Linguistics · Possessive · Property (philosophy) · Semantic property · Semantics (computer science) · Computer Science · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Mathematics · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Philosophy · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation