Definiteness, Structure and Agreement in Turkish Possessives

A Note on Mandarin Possessives, Demonstratives, and Definiteness

Yang (2004) observes that in Mandarin, an initial possessor phrase (PossessorP) may be followed by a bare noun as in (1), or by a possessee phrase that can be headed by a numeral and classifier, [Numeral + CL + N], as in (2) or by a demonstrative, [Dem + (Numeral) + CL + N] as in (3). (In all the examples in this section, we begin with Yang’s own initial glosses and translations. The interpreta...

Definiteness and Structure of NPs in Slavic

Possessives, Favorite, and Coercion

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 Vi...

Possessives in Context

Is there anything interesting to be said about the semantics of possessives? Consider the English Saxon genitive DP John’s dog. The meaning conveyed by this DP depends on the meaning of the nouns John and dog: the actual denotation of John’s dog cannot be determined unless the denotations of John and dog are known. Still, knowing the meaning of John’s dog does not amount simply to knowing who J...

Specificity and Definiteness in Sentence and Discourse Structure

The paper gives a contrastive analysis of the two semantic categories specificity and definiteness. It argues against the traditional picture that assumes that specific expressions are a subclass of indefinite NPs. The paper rather assumes that the two categories are independent of each other. Definiteness expresses the discourse pragmatic property of familiarity, while specificity mirrors a mo...