The English Possessive Marker in a Framework of Relevance

Martin Aitken

doi:10.7146/hjlcb.v22i43.96877

Abstract

English nominals constructed with the morpheme {-s} as a so-called possessive marker may be assigned an indeﬁnitely large number of interpretations depending on the context of utterance. This raises interesting questions concerning the interface between semantics and pragmatics, most obviously concerning the more speciﬁc nature of the contextually invariable encoded content of the morpheme as well as the contribution made by that content to the process of comprehension. This article aims brieﬂy to suggest one solution to these problems by proposing an underdetermined procedural semantics feeding into a principled cognitive process of inference as proposed within the framework of relevance theory.

Highlights

Any assumption of cognitive economy in the comprehension process would seem to run against a polysemous account whereby the possessive marker is construed as encoding multiple meanings across a wide semantic field
Concluding remarks Above I have presented a claim about the more exact nature of the encoded content of the {-s} morpheme in English. This claim is founded on a distinction between an invariable underdetermined semantics and an inferential process of comprehension to which that semantics is contributes and which yields fuller conceptual representations of the meaning intended to be conveyed by the speaker
While I am much in agreement with the fundamentals of Langacker’s and Taylor’s construal of the semantics of {-s} in terms of the reference-point thesis, and with some of its more specific details, as I have just outlined, I do believe that relevance theory provides a potentially much more satisfactory framework than the cognitive grammar (CG) approach on which the aforementioned approaches are founded5

Summary

Introduction

Any assumption of cognitive economy in the comprehension process would seem to run against a polysemous account whereby the possessive marker is construed as encoding multiple meanings across a wide semantic field. My claim here is that the problem of accounting for the relationship between the context-invariable encoded semantics of {-s} and contextually assigned meanings associated with nominals in which it occurs can be solved within a relevance-based framework.

Results

Conclusion