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The Semantics of Possessives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Stanley Peters  and
Dag Westerståhl
Stanley Peters*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
Dag Westerståhl*
Affiliation:
Stockholm University and University of Gothenburg
*
[peters@stanford.edu]
[peters@stanford.edu]
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Extract

We investigate what possessives mean by examining a wide range of English examples, pre- and postnominal, quantified and nonquantified, to arrive at general, systematic truth conditions for them. In the process, we delineate a rich class of paradigmatic possessives having crosslinguistic interest, exploiting characteristic semantic properties. One is that all involve (implicit or explicit) quantification over possessed entities. Another is that this quantification always carries existential import, even when the quantifier over possessed entities itself does not. We show that this property, termed possessive existential import, is intimately related to the notion of narrowing (Barker 1995). Narrowing has implications for compositionally analyzing possessives’ meaning. We apply the proposed semantics to the issues of the definiteness of possessives, negation of possessives, partitives and prenominal possessives, postnominal possessives and complements of relational nouns, freedom of the possessive relation, and the semantic relationship between pre- and postnominal possessives.

Keywords

possessive (prenominal and postnominal)compositional semanticsexistential importnarrowingdefinitenesspartitivesrelational noun complements

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 89 , Issue 4 , December 2013 , pp. 713 - 759
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

We thank Arto Anttila, Chris Barker, Greg Carlson, Lucas Champollion, Edit Doron, Vivienne Fong, Lauri Karttunen, Ed Keenan, Peter Lasersohn, Peter Pagin, Barbara Partee, Stephen Read, Ivan Sag, and Anna Szabolcsi for helpful comments and discussion, along with three anonymous referees whose detailed and insightful remarks improved the article substantially. Peters's work on this article was supported in part by the Stanford Presidential Pilot Program of Research Funding for the Humanities. Westerstahl's work was supported by a grant from the Swedish Research Council.

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Addendum to ‘The semantics of possessives’: Barker on quantified possessives
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