Some Puzzles of Predicate Possessives (original) (raw)

Compositionality in Formal Semantics

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.