Semantics of possessive determiners

Authors

  • Stanley Peters Stanford University Author
  • Dag Westerståhl Göteborg University Author

Abstract

We give a uniform account of a wide range of possessive determiners, including simple (John’s), quantified (few doctors’), and partitive (each of most students’), focusing on certain (frequently neglected) features of their semantics. One is the mode of quantification over the ‘possessed’ objects: often universal, but other modes are allowed too. Another is what Barker 1995 calls narrowing: we agree that it belongs to the semantics of possessives but note that it appears to lead to certain methodological problems. A third is the role of definiteness for possessives: we compare our account to the ‘definiteness account’ common in the literature, and in particular discuss the definiteness of partitives. Fourth, we study the monotonicity behavior of possessives.

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Published

2005-12-01

Issue

2005: Proceedings of the 15th Amsterdam Colloquium

Section

Conference Proceedings

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Peters, S., & Westerståhl, D. (2005). Semantics of possessive determiners. Proceedings of the Amsterdam Colloquium, 185-190. https://platform.openjournals.nl/PAC/article/view/22994