A Semantic Analysis of the English Genitive. Interaction of Lexical and Formal Semantics

Abstract

Some earlier treatments of the semantics of the prenominal genitive assume two syntactic types for genitive NPs like the girl's, one which combines with relational nouns like sister, and another that combines with non‐relational nouns like car. In the former case the genitive relation is provided by the relational head noun, in the latter the source of the relation is taken to be provided by the utterance context. Our analysis uniformly assumes only one syntactic type for genitive NPs, viz., one that forces a genitive NP to combine only with relational nouns. In cases with inherently non‐relational head nouns, such as the girl's car, we hypothesize that the genitive NP coerces a shift of the meaning of the head noun so that it becomes relational. To determine the sort of meaning shift which is carried out, we appeal to the qualia structure of the lexical entry for the head noun. A consequence of this analysis is an extension of the area of lexically determined interpretations and a corresponding reduction of the context‐determined, pragmatic area.