Possessive interpretation at the semantics-pragmatics interface

Abstract

This paper discusses semantic and pragmatic aspects of possessive interpretation (PI), the process whereby semantically underspecified possessive noun phrases (NPs) such as John Smith’s house and the house of John Smith receive concrete referential interpretations (e.g. ‘the house owned by John Smith’) in context. By observing what is common to the interpretation of both constructions, I lay out the ingredients for a uniform pragmatic account of PI whilst rehashing the contextualist notion of saturation. As defined by Recanati (2004, 2010) and many others, saturation is a linguistically mandated and obligatory pragmatic process, operating to enrich the incomplete logical forms of referring expressions, including possessive NPs. I argue that present proposals which assume that saturating the possessive relation is crucial to determining the possessive referent fail to do justice to the many ways in which possessive NPs may be understood in concrete communicative situations. Supporting similar claims by Korta and Perry (2017), this suggests that saturation is more adequately defined as a communicatively optional pragmatic process. The discussion simultaneously contributes to the growing literature on pragmatic aspects of constructions as form-meaning pairings, by outlining some of the theoretical issues that arise from the division of labour between semantic and pragmatic meaning in PI.

Allostructions revisited

“…Secondly, Stefanowitsch's account fails to differentiate adequately between semantic and pragmatic meaning. We will argue that, once these two aspects of the meaning of s- and of -genitives are adequately delineated, it becomes possible to assume semantic meaning equivalence between the two constructions ( Kolkmann, 2019 ).…”

“…Gutzmann, 2010 ; Gutzmann and Schuhmacher, 2018 ). This goes for s - and of -genitives alike (see Kolkmann, 2019 for a detailed account).…”

Epistemological challenges in the study of alternating constructions

“…( 2) (Jackendoff, 1997;Dehé, 2002;Gries, 2003;Cappelle, 2006), the English genitive alternation, e.g. (3) (Rosenbach, 2002;Stefanowitsch, 2003;Wolk et al, 2013;Grafmiller, 2014;Kolkmann, 2019) and the English and Dutch dative alternations, e.g. ( 4) (Goldberg, 1995(Goldberg, , 2002Yaguello, 1997;Bresnan, 2007;Bresnan et al, 2007;Bresnan and Ford, 2010;De Cuypere and Verbeke, 2013;De Cuypere, 2015;Colleman, 2009Colleman, , 2012Baten and De Cuypere, 2014;Geleyn, 2017).…”