Fall semantics seminar:

POSSESSION

Chris Barker chris.barker@nyu.edu

Wednesdays 2-4:45, Linguistics conference room, 719 Broadway, Manhattan. First meeting: 6 Sep 2006

Topic: Nouns (reference) and verbs (assertion) are yin and yang, dual aspects of language form (and language use). In particular, possessive constructions (in English: John's child, a child of John, a child of John's, perhaps John has a child) are dual to transitive sentences, comparable in semantic richness and nuance to their verbal counterparts. Topics covered include basic truth conditions (how does the possession relation enter into the composition?), nominal argument structure, scope of quantificational possessors, binding out of DP and weak crossover, (in)definiteness and discourse status, genitive of negation, construct state, thematic relations, compounding, and more. This seminar will not assume a high level of technical facility, but we will push discussions in the direction of explicitness and precision wherever possible.

Readings: A preliminary bibliography will unfold over the next few days here. Bibliography: Yura Lander has an excellent Bibliography on Possessives and Related Problems.

Auditors: Auditors welcome. Enrolled students will write a short research paper on any topic legitimately related to the semantics of possessives or relational nouns. All participants will be invited to contribute a summary and critique of one or more papers.

Panta rei: The topics and readings included in the seminar are likely to change, perhaps dramatically, as I get to know the backgrounds and the interests of the participants. Suggestions are welcome. This is not a list of readings that everyone will be expected to read. Some readings will be excerpts, and some readings will be distributed among participants according to individual interests, and many readings are there only to in case someone develops an interest in a relevant topic.

Basics

Basic truth conditions: Compositionality: just how pragmatically unrestricted is a possession relation? Where in the compositional semantics does the possession relation come from?

• Partee, Barbara H. (1997) "Genitives - A case study". Appendix to Theo M.V.Janssen, "Compositionality". In J.F.A.K. van Benthem & A. ter Meulen (eds.), Handbook of Logic and Linguistics, Amsterdam, Elsevier Science Publishers. http://www.science.uva.nl/pub/theory/illc/ResearchReports/LP-1996-03.text.pdf

  Although first published in 1997, this was originally part of Partee's classic 1982 L&P article `Compositionality' (it was cut at the insistence of an editor for reasons of space).

• Barker, Chris (1995) Possessive Descriptions. CSLI Pub. http://homepages.nyu.edu/~cb125/Papers/barker.dissertation.pdf

  Chapter 1 contains a simple-minded introduction to the constituent structure of possessives in English. Chapter 2 discusses relational nouns and functional operators such as favorite. Chapter 3 works through a May 1985 theory of quantifier raising for quantificational possessives. Chapter 4 introduces the notion of possessive domain narrowing, and goes on to speculate about the interaction of possessives with the proportion problem (yes, as in adverbial quantification). The introduction surveys the main results of all four chapters, so its a good place to start to see what, if anything, of the remainder is of interest.

• Vikner, Carl & Per Anker Jensen (1999). "A semantic analysis of the English genitive: Interaction of lexical and formal semantics". Ms., Copenhagen and Kolding, Denmark. vikner-jensen-1999-genitive-semantics.pdf

Classic syntax: nominalizations, complementation, the analogy with sentences

• Jackendoff, Ray (1968) "Possessives in English". In S.Anderson, R.Jackendoff, & S.J.Keyser (eds.), Studies in Transformational Grammar and Related Topics, Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis Univ. Press, 25-51.
• Chomsky, Noam (1970) "Remarks on nominalizations". In R.A.Jacobs & P.S.Rosenbaum (eds.), Readings in English Transformational Grammar, Waltham etc.
• Grimshaw, Jane (1991) Argument Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Abney, Steven P. (1987) The English Noun Phrase in its Sentential Aspect. PhD diss., MIT. http://www.sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de/~abney/

  Not the first, but the best known declaration of the analogy between sentences and noun phrases.

Binding out of DP, weak crossover, secondary weak crossover

• May, Robert (1985) Logical Form: Its Structure and Derivation. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• Postal, Paul (1993) Remarks on weak crossover effects. Linguistic Inquiry 24:539--556.
• Potts, Christopher (2001) (Only) some crossover effects repaired. Snippets 3:13--14.
• Heim, Irene and Angelika Kratzer (1998) Semantics in generative grammar Blackwell. (Mostly chapters 7 and 8)
• Buering, Daniel (2004) Crossover situations. Natural Language Semantics 12.1:23--62.

  This theory was first presented in public at the NYU SALT. The lights went out after the first three minutes of the talk, at which Daniel quickly said, "Any questions?".

Double-genitives and partitives:

Compared to a friend of Mary, in a friend of Mary's, there seems to be a redundant instance of the possessive morpheme (hence `double genitive').

• Ladusaw, William A. (1982) Semantic Constraints on the English Partitive Construction. Proceedings of WCCFL 1, Stanford, 231--242.
• Barker, Chris (1998) "Partitives, double genitives, and anti-uniqueness". Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 16, 679--717. http://ling.ucsd.edu/~barker/Research/barker.anti-uniqueness.pdf
• Storto, Gianluca. Double genitives aren't (quite) partitives. CLS 36. http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~storto/papers/CLS36.pdf
• Zamparelli, Roberto (1998) A theory of Kinds, Partitives and of/z Possessives. In: Wilder, C. and Alexiadou, A.(eds.) Possessors, Predicates and Movement in the Determiner Phrase, John Benjamins, Amsterdam. http:\\ftp.cogsci.ed.ac.uk\pub\roberto\ling\parkind.A4.pdf
• Anttila, Arto and Vivienne Fong (date?) The Partitive Constraint in Optimality Theory anttila-fong-partitive-constraint-in-OT.pdf

Type shifting and implicit arguments

• An excellent bibliography from Liina Pylkkanen's 2006 NYU seminar, Mechanisms of Noncompositionality Resolution, including much material on type-shifting and coercion: http://homepages.nyu.edu/~mp108/Compositionality_Seminar_Spring2006.html
• A classic reference: Partee, Barbara H. (1987) Noun phrase interpretation and type-shifting principles. In J. Groenendijk, D. de Jongh, and M. Stokhof (eds). Studies in Discourse Representation Theory and the Theory of Generalized Quantifiers. GRASS 8, Foris, Dordrecht. 115-143. http://homepages.nyu.edu/~cb125/Possessives/partee-87.pdf
• A key manifesto: Liina Pylkkanen and Brian McElree (2005) The syntax-semantic interface: On-line composition of sentence meaning. In M. Traxler & M.A. Gernsbacher (eds). Handbook of Psycholinguistics (2nd Ed). NY: Elsevier. http://www.psych.nyu.edu/pylkkanen/papers/Syntax-semantics-interface_Oct2005.pdf
• Partee, Barbara H. (1989) Binding Implicit Variables in Quantified Contexts. In CLS 25.
• Partee, Barbara H.& Vladimir Borschev (1998) Integrating lexical and formal semantics: Genitives, relational nouns, and type-shifting. In R. Cooper and T. Gamkrelidze (eds.), Proceedings of the Second Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic, and Computation, Tbilisi: Center on Language, Logic, Speech, Tbilisi State University, 229-241. http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~partee/docs/tbilisi17.pdf
• Partee, Barbara H.& Vladimir Borschev (2000) Possessives, favorite, and coercion. To appear in Proceedings of ESCOL99. http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~partee/docs/partee-favorite.pdf
• Ryan, Robert (2001) A method of interpreting prenominal possessives: incorporating the generative lexicon and type-shifting. In Working papers in linguistics, vol. 1. (59--73). The Department of English, Lund University. http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/574787.html
• Winter, Yoad (2006) Type shifting with semantic features: a unified perspective. In Chris Barker and Pauline Jacobson (eds). Direct Compositionality. Oxford. http://homepages.nyu.edu/~cb125/Possessives/winter-type-shifting.pdf

Possessors on the move!

• Szabolcsi, Anna (1983) The possessor that ran away from home. The Linguistic Review 3:89--102.
• Munn, Alan (1995) The possessor that stayed close to home. In Proceedings of WECOL V.
• Tasseva-Kurktchieva (2005) The possessor that came home. Possessives and Beyond: Semantics and Syntax. UMOP 29 (University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers). Ji-yung Kim, Barbara H. Partee, and Yury A. Lander (eds). Amherst, MA: GLSA Publications. pp. 279-293. http://www.mila.studiok-rfc.com/papers/TassevaPossWorkshop.pdf
• Giorgi, Alessandra & Giuseppe Longobardi (1991) The Syntax of Noun Phrases. Cambridge Univ. Press.
• Kayne, Richard (1994) The Antisymmetry of Syntax, MIT Press, Cambridge.
• Aissen, J. L. (1990) Possessor Ascension in Tzotzil. In L. Martin (ed.) Papers in Mayan linguistics, 89--108. Columbia, MO: Lucas Brothers Publishers.
• Doris L. Payne and Immanuel Barshi (eds) (1999) External Possession. Typological Studies in Language 39. John Benjamins. http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_bookview.cgi?bookid=TSL%2039

  Blurb: External Possession Constructions (EPCs) are found in nearly all parts of the world and across widely divergent language families. The data-rich papers in this first-ever volume on EPCs document their typological variability, explore diachronic reasons for variations, and investigate their functions and theoretical ramifications. EPCs code the possessor as a core grammatical relation of the verb and in a constituent separate from that which contains the possessed item. Though EPCs express possession, they do so without the necessary involvement of a possessive predicate such as have or own. In many cases, EPCs appear to `break the rules' about how many arguments a verb of a given valence can have. They thus constitute an important limiting case for evaluating theories of the relationship between verbal argument structure and syntactic clause structure. They also raise core questions about intersections among verbal valence, cognitive event construal, voice, and language processing.

• Vera Lee-Schoenfeld (2006) German possessor datives: Raised and affected. To appear in Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 9.2. http://people.ucsc.edu/~vls/Papers/Possessor_Datives_JCGL.pdf

European possessives

• Antal, L. (1964) The possessive form of the Hungarian noun. Linguistics 3, 50-61.
• Ivic, Milka (1986) On referential strategies: Genitivization vs. adjectivization in Serbo-Croatian. Linguistische Arbeitsberichte 54-55, 23-27.
• Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria (forthc.) Romani genitives in a cross-linguistic perspective. In Matras, Y. and V. Elsik (eds). Grammatical Relations in Romani: The Noun Phrase. John Benjamins.
• Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria (forthc.) Genitives and possessive NPs in the languages of Europe. In Plank, Frans (ed.) The Noun Phrase in the Languages of Europe. Mouton de Gruyter.
• Langacker, Ronald W. (1968) Observations on French possessives. Language 44, 51-75.
• Pylkkänen, Liina (1998) The 'Be' of Possession in Finnish. MIT Ms. http://web.mit.edu/liina/www/be.ps
• Szabolcsi, Anna (1994) The noun phrase. In: Kiefer and Kiss (eds). The Syntactic Structure of Hungarian. Academic Press, 179-275.
• Szabolcsi, Anna (1981) The possessive construction in Hungarian: a configurational category in a non-configurational language. Acta Linguistica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 31: 161-189.
• Skarabela, B., C. O'Connor, and J. Maling (2004). Monolexemicke posesory v cestine a jinych jazycich. (Monolexemic possessors in Czech and other languages.) In: Hladka, Z. a P. Karlik. Cestina--univerzalia a specifika, 5. (Czech universals and specifics, 5.) Praha: Nakladatelstvi Lidove Noviny. Pp.28-36.
• Pancheva, R. (2004). Balkan Possessive Clitics: The Problem of Case and Category. In O. Tomic (ed). Balkan Syntax and Semantics. John Benjamins, 175-219. (Ms. USC, 2002). http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~pancheva/Pancheva(2004)BalkanPossClitics.pdf

Genitive of negation (Slavic)

• Partee, Barbara and Vladimir Borschev (2005), The Semantics of Russian Genitive of Negation: The Nature and Role of Perspectival Structure. SALT 14. http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/2ViODE0M/

  Clear-headed entree into a vast literature.

Construct state

• Heller, Daphna (2002) On the Construct State, Uniqueness and Genitive Relations, Proceedings of IATL 18 (Israeli Association for Theoretical Linguistics). http://atar.mscc.huji.ac.il/%7Eenglish/IATL/18/Heller.pdf
• Heller, Daphna (2002) Possession as a Lexical Relation: Evidence from the Hebrew Construct State. In L. Mikkelsen and C. Potts (eds), WCCFL 21 Proceedings, pp. 127-140. Cascadilla Press. http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/dheller/download/HellerWCCFL2002.pdf
• Dobrovie-Sorin (see entry under (in)defininteness)
• Danon, G. (2001). Syntactic definiteness in the grammar of Modern Hebrew. Linguistics 39:107--116.
• Winter, Yoad (see entry under (in)definiteness)

(In)definiteness

• Loebner, Sebastian (1985) Definites. Journal of Semantics 4:279--326. loebner
• Woisetschlager, Eric (1983) On the Definiteness of the old man's book. Linguistic Inquiry 14: 137-154.
• Enç, Mürvet (1991) The semantics of specificity. Linguistic Inquiry 22: 1-25.
• Poesio, Massimo (1994) Weak definites. In Proceedings of SALT 4. ftp://ftp.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/pub/poesio/SALT4.ps.gz
• Satoshi Stanley Koike (1997) Prenominal and Postnominal Possessives, Discourse Familiarity and Bridging. ESCOL '97.
• Dobrovie-Sorin, Carmen (2000) (In)definiteness spread: from Romanian Genitives to Hebrew Construct State Nominals. In V. Motapanyane (ed), Comparative Studies in Romanian Syntax, John Benjamins, Amsterdam. http://homepages.nyu.edu/~cb125/Possessives/sorin-indef-spread-2000.pdf Home page: http://www.llf.cnrs.fr/Gens/Sorin/index-en.php
• Dobrovie-Sorin, Carmen (2004) Genitives and Determiners. In Kim et al. (eds), UMOP 29. 115-132. http://homepages.nyu.edu/~cb125/Possessives/sorin-gen-and-det.pdf
• Barker, Chris (2005) {2005} Possessive weak definites. In Kim, Ji-yung, Lander, Yury, and Partee, Barbara H. (eds). Possessives and Beyond: Semantics and Syntax. Amherst, MA: GLSA Publications. 89--113. http://homepages.nyu.edu/~cb125/Papers/barker.weak.definites.pdf
• Winter, Yoad (2005) On Some Problems of (In)deniteness within Flexible Semantics Lingua 115:767-786. http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~winter/papers/lingua.pdf

Plurals and body-part nouns

• Chappell, Hillary and William McGregor (eds.) (1996) The grammar of inalienability. A typological perspective on body part terms and the part-whole relation. (Empirical approaches to languages typology, 14.) Mouton de Gruyter.
• Fox, Barbara (1981) Body part syntax: towards a universal characterization. Studies in Language 5.3:323--342.
• Moltmann, Friederike (2003) Parts and Wholes in Semantics. Oxford.

Have

• Brugman, Claudia (1988) The Syntax and Semantics of HAVE and Its Complements. PhD diss., Univ. of California, Berkeley.
• Déchaine, Rose-Marie, Teun Hoekstra, & Johan Rooryck (1995) Augmented and non-augmented HAVE. In Léa Nash & Georges Tsoulas (eds), Actes du premier colloque Langues & Grammaire, Paris VIII. 85-101. http://www.leidenuniv.nl/hil/faculty/staff/rooryck/hoekstra.pdf
• Jensen, Per Anker and Carl Vikner (1996) The Double Nature of the Verb have. LAMBDA 21, Institut for Datalingvistik, Copenhagen Business School, 25-37. http://www.cbs.dk/departments/dl/cv/have.htm
• Uriagereka, Juan. From Being to Having: Questions about ontology from a Kayne/Szabolcsi syntax. http://www.ling.umd.edu/Courses/Ling819/Papers/Poss.pdf
• Izvorski, Roumyana (1998) Non-Indicative Wh-Complements of Possessive and Existential Predicates In Pius N. Tamanji and Kiyomi Kusumoto (eds.) Proceedings of NELS 28, 159-173. http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~pancheva/nonindicative.pdf

Inalienability and locatives

• Broekhuis, Hans & Leonie Cornips (1997) Inalienable possession in locational constructions. Lingua 101:185--209.
• Clark, Eve V. (1978) Locationals: existential, locative, and possessive constructions. In J. Greenberg et al. (eds.) Universals of Human Language, 4: Syntax. Stanford University Press, 85-126.
• Lyons, John (1967) A note on possessive, existential, and locative sentences. Foundations of Language 3:390--396.
• Nichols, Johanna (1988) On alienable and inalienable possession. In Shipley, W. (ed.) In Honor of Mary Haas: From the Haas Festival Conference on Native American Linguistics. Mouton de Gruyter. 557--609.

Irreversible relations

The dog's tail, *the tail's dog

• Langacker, Ronald W. (1993) Reference-point constructions. Cognitive Linguistics 4.1:1-38.
• Hayase, Naoko (1993) Prototypical Meaning vs. Semantic Constraints in the Analysis of English Possessive Genitives. English Linguistics 10:133-159.
• Barker, Chris and David Dowty (1993) Non-verbal Thematic Proto-Roles. In A.Schafer (ed). Proceedings of NELS 23, vol. 1, GSLA, Amherst, 49--62. http://ling.ucsd.edu/~barker/Research/barker.dowty.nominal.proto-roles.pdf

Predication

• Mandelbaum, D. (1994) Syntactic conditions on saturation. CUNY PhD dissertation. http://homepages.nyu.edu/~cb125/Possessives/mandelbaum-diss-1994.pdf Chapter 4 is the one most relevant for the study of possessives: http://homepages.nyu.edu/~cb125/Possessives/mandelbaum-diss-ch4.pdf
• Doron, Edith (1988) The semantics of predicate nominals. Linguistics 26.2.
• Larson, Richard K. & Cho S. (1999) Temporal adjectives and the structure of possessive DPs. In Proceedings of WCCFL 18, Cambridge: Casadilla Press. http://homepages.nyu.edu/~cb125/Possessives/larson-cho-03.pdf

Philosophy of language

• Stanley, Jason (2000) Context and logical form Linguistics and Philosophy 23.4:391--434. (See the conclusion for a discussion of possessives.)
• Soames, Scott (2005) Naming and Assertion, in Szabo (ed) Semantics versus Pragmatics, Oxford. (There's a footnote discussing possessives.)

• Moltmann, Friederike (2006) Comparatives without Degrees semanticsarchive.net
• Moltmann, Friederike (2005) Properties and Kinds of Tropes. New Linguistic Facts and Old Philosophical Insights. semanticsarchive.net

Choosing among different possessive construcitons

• http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/oconnor.html
• O'Connor, M.C. (2003). Differential possessor expression: Are pair-wise comparisons ever required? In Butt, M and T. King, (Eds.) Proceedings of the LFG03 Conference. CSLI Publications. 119--140. long and messy link

  Lots of stuff about possessives in Northern Pomo!

Compounds

• Kay, Paul & Karl Zimmer (1976) On the semantics of compounds and genitives in English. Proccedings of 6th California Linguistic Association Conference, 29-35. Reprinted in S.L. Tsohatzidis (ed.) (1990). Meanings and Prototypes: Studies in Linguistic Categorization. Routledge, 239-246.
• Taylor, John R. (1996) Possessives in English. Clarendon Press. (Chapter 7)
• Munn

Nulls

• Delfitto, Denis, Yves D'Hulst (1995) On the syntax of null possessive anaphors. Recherches de linguistique française et romane d'Utrecht, 14, 13-38.
• Nerbonne, John & Tony Mullen (1998) Null-headed nominals in German and English. In F. van Eynde, I. Schuurman & N. Schelkens (eds.), Proc. of Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands 1998, Rodopi, 143-64. http://odur.let.rug.nl/~nerbonne/papers/null-n-lp-CLIN98.ps

UMOP 29: Possessives and Beyond: Semantics and Syntax

From NP to DP, Vol 2: The expression of possession in noun phrases

Formal gems

• Keenan Edward L. (1996) The semantics of determiners. In S.Lappin (ed.), The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory. Blackwell, 41-63.
• Keenan Edward L. & Jonathan Stavi (1986) A Semantic Characterization of Natural Language Determiners. Linguistics and Philosophy 9:253-326.

History

• Allen, Cynthia L. (1998) Loss of the postnominal genitive in English. In Proceedings of Australian Linguistic Society.