Possessives, Favorite, and Coercion
نویسندگان
چکیده
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 Vikner (1994), Vikner and Jensen (1999), Partee and Borschev (1998), Borschev and Partee (1999a,b) analyze all possessives as argument-like, a conclusion we are no longer sure of for English (see Partee and Borschev, in press). But while we now doubt that such an analysis is correct for all kinds of possessives in all languages, we believe that it is correct for some kinds of possessives in some languages, and that it represents a promising approach to other constructions as well, including the behavior of the relational adjective favorite. In this paper we focus on this kind of uniform analysis, and on the coercion principles required to shift the argument structure of lexical items to meet the demands imposed by the construction. We first discuss our central question about possessives and then turn to more specific questions about the role of coercion in the possible uniform analysis of possessives and an analogous possible uniform analysis of favorite. One of our principal conclusions is that our earlier view of coercion with possessives as principally a triggering of type-shifting operations has to be refined, as speculated by Partee and Borschev (1998) and urged by Vikner and Jensen (1999), to accommodate finer-grained sort-shifting.
منابع مشابه
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