The pragmatics of possession: A corpus study of English prenominal possessives

Abstract

We present a large-scale corpus study of English prenominal possessives (e.g., Mary's house) which investigates how their referential interpretations (e.g., ‘the house Mary owns’) are linguistically supported in natural language contexts. The study is set against a long tradition of formal semantic accounts which take possessive interpretations to arise primarily from the lexical semantics of the possessive noun phrase, thereby suggesting that pragmatic reasoning plays a lesser role (Partee, 1983/1997; Barker, 1995, 2000; Vikner & Jensen, 2002, 2003, 2004). One claim of these accounts is that non-lexically derived or ‘pragmatic’ interpretations (e.g., ‘the house Mary dreams of buying’) require explicit contextual support, while this is not needed for ‘lexical’ interpretations (e.g., ‘the house Mary owns’), which are considered default and available in the absence of contextual support. The empirical results from our study suggest a complex picture whereby interpretations of both purported types receive various kinds and degrees of contextual support. We argue that this, coupled with independent evidence that the linguistic co-text usually explicates the relationships between discourse referents and that context-free interpretations are a myth, jeopardizes the cognitive plausibility of interpretation taxonomies which distinguish ‘lexical’ from ‘pragmatic’ interpretations. We sketch a more cognitively-oriented pragmatic approach to possessive interpretations that takes into consideration the multidimensionality of context while attributing an overall greater role to pragmatic reasoning.