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Indefinite possessive NPs and the distinction between determining and nondetermining genitives in English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2007

PETER WILLEMSE
PETER WILLEMSE
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Leuven, Blijde-Inkomststraat 21, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium, [email protected]
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Abstract

This article tries to fill a descriptive gap in the literature on English possessive NPs by offering a systematic description of indefinite possessive NPs (e.g. a friend's house, a widow's pension, men's suits). Specifically, two descriptive issues are dealt with. Firstly, the different types of determining indefinite genitives are discussed. It is shown that indefinite determiner genitives can have specific reference, generalized reference or generic reference. Moreover, it is argued that in all of these cases, the indefinite genitive specifies a reference point (Langacker 1993) for the identification of the ‘possessee’ and functions as a grounding predication. It is also proposed that subsective gradience (Aarts 2004, 2007) can be diagnosed for determining genitives, i.e. that more central and more peripheral members can be distinguished within this category. Secondly, the distinction between determining and nondetermining, classifying genitives (e.g. a [woman's magazine] ‘a magazine for women’) is re-examined. This distinction is relevant to the description of indefinite possessive NPs, since they have been considered as evidence for a fuzzy boundary between determining and nondetermining genitives (Taylor 1996, Rosenbach 2006). It is argued, against such an analysis, that the two functions of the genitive can be clearly distinguished, even in ‘bridging contexts’ (Evans & Wilkins 2000), i.e. contexts in which both a determining and a nondetermining reading are supported. Consequently, there is no intersective gradience (Aarts 2004, 2007) between determining and nondetermining genitives on the level of the constructional semantics.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , November 2007 , pp. 537 - 568
Copyright
Cambridge University Press 2007

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Footnotes

This article was made possible by the postdoctoral grant PDM/06/078 from the Research Council of the University of Leuven. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Kristin Davidse, for her insightful comments on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to thank John Taylor for useful suggestions, and Tine Breban and Lieselotte Brems for much appreciated discussion of some of the issues discussed in this article. Finally, I am grateful to the two anonymous referees who reviewed the article for ELL for their detailed and constructive comments, and to the editor, Bas Aarts, for his kind and efficient editorial guidance.