Data: dijous 3 de juny del 2021

Hora: 12.00 h

Accés: en línia, amb Collaborate

(Enllaç: eu.bbcollab.com/guest/cbd918ec0de7403f94ba44b0a67b7a2d)

Resum: English pre-nominal possessives (N’s N) express a relation between two nominals, e.g. kinship (John’s sister), time (yesterday’s newspaper), control (John’s car) and many others given that this relation is contingent upon context. However, the degree to which the linguistic context overtly explicates this relation varies from utterance to utterance, ranging from low-information contexts (e.g. John walked into the pub. His coat was white from the snow.) to contexts which are far more telling (e.g. John is a first-time author. His book has been a great success). Given that possessive interpretation is a non-issue from a communicative point of view, the question arises where the possessive relation originates from: is it provided by the (linguistic or extra-linguistic) context, does it come from the semantics of the head noun, or do we need to appeal to both?

The locus of the possessive relation has been a matter of contention among formal semanticists on the one hand (e.g. Barker 1995, Vikner & Jensen 2002) and cognitively-oriented pragmaticists (e.g. Sperber & Wilson 1986/1995, Blakemore 2002, Aitken 2009) on the other: where semantic accounts often argue in favour of a default semantics for pre-nominal possessives and thus predict a rather minor contribution of the context, pragmatic accounts converge on the idea of an underspecified semantics enriched by means of a pragmatic process that operates over decoded linguistic meanings and contextually available assumptions.

In this paper, we present the results of a corpus analysis of 3,000 pre-nominal possessive NPs which were analysed in terms of what kind of relation they expressed and how much contextual explication each relation received. The results show that the quantitative reality is far more mixed than what is predicted by default semantic accounts, and that co-textual support of possessive interpretations is the norm, even in cases where the semantics of the head noun indicates a possible possessive relation. We take our results to be compatible with an account where contextually appropriate possessive relations are derived mainly pragmatically, on the basis of accessible encyclopaedic or situational knowledge as well as the linguistic context, from highly underspecified relations encoded by possessive NPs. This approach has the advantage of accounting uniformly not only for possessive interpretations in high-information contexts but also for readily available interpretations in low-information contexts.