6. Possessives and relational nouns

Abstract

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 person counts as a friend only in virtue of standing in a particular relationship with another individual. Relational nouns are an important element in the study of possessives because the content of a possessive typically, perhaps characteristically, depends on the content of a relational nominal. Possessives provide particularly compelling support for type shifting as a general principle of syntactic and semantic composition. Possessives also inform debates involving definiteness, binding, and a number of other semantic phenomena. Some bibliographic notes: Partee 1997, an influential analysis of the possessive, first circulated in manuscript form around 1983, though by 1990 my attempts to get hold of a copy were not successful. My 1991 dissertation, published in 1995, provides a general introduction to nominal possessives and relational nouns. Taylor 1996 and Heine 1997 are book-length treatments in the Cognitive Grammar tradition. There is a literature in French, discussed in Dobrovie-Sorin 2000a with special attention to the contributions of Milner. Peters and Westerstal 2006: chapter 7 covers much of the same ground as this article from a different point of view, and Coene and d’Hulst 2003 and Kim et al. 2004 contain a number of studies discussing the syntax and semantics of possessives. Some works specific to possessives are available at semanticsarchive.net/links.html, notably bibliographies and other resources compiled by Yury Lander and by Barbara Partee.