The possessive morpheme in English occurs in a variety of constructions - prenominal possessives (the man's hat, the plane's arrival), postnominal possessives (a friend of mine), -ing nominalizations (without my saying so), and possessive compounds (a girls' school). What does this morpheme actually mean, what is its syntactic category, what is its semantic contribution to the expressions in which it occurs, and how can various restrictions on its use be accounted for?
Dr Taylor proposes a unitary account of the possessive morpheme. He takes as his theoretical framework Cognitive Grammar, as developed over the past 15 years by Ronald Langacker and others. In the earlier chapters of the book he introduces and motivates the conceptual apparatus of the theory, and in later chapters he develops a coherent account of the full range of possessive constructions in English.
A special feature of the book is that it offers a wide-ranging critique of both traditional and more recent accounts of possessive expressions. Focusing particularly on Government and Binding theory, the author highlights the profound conceptual differences underlying the two theoretical approaches represented by GB and Cognitive Grammar, while also observing some points of convergence between them.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
meticulously written, cogent and profound ... this book must be credited with overall success because of exhaustive material, the richness of the analysis and the way it presents its ideas. * Linguist List 12.1731 * destined to become one of the keystone texts of this specific school of theorization and research ... This remarkable monograph would be of great value to anyone interested in cognitive linguistics, and cognitive grammar in particular. * Linguist List 12.1731 * Few topics in English linguistics match the possessive in richness of construction types, token frequency, and the lenge for both a syntactician and a semanticist. Yet, apart from a number of recent dissertations and a monograph or two, this may be the first full-bore, book-length treatment of the English possessive, which makes Taylor's book a welcome addition to the growing body of literature approaching the syntax-semantics interface . . . it is an excellent starting point, and one which can lead us further into a much-desired convergence of theoretical frameworks. * Chris Barker and Maria Polinsky, University of California, San Diego, Language 74(4) *
Sprache
Verlagsort
Zielgruppe
Illustrationen
9 black and white figures
Maße
Höhe: 234 mm
Breite: 156 mm
Dicke: 21 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-0-19-829982-0 (9780198299820)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
John R. Taylor is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Otago. He is the author of Linguistic Categorization: Prototypes in Linguistic Theory (OUP 1989; second edition 1995), and editor (with R. MacLaury) of Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World (Mouton de Gruyter 1995).
Autor*in
Senior Lecturer in LinguisticsSenior Lecturer in Linguistics, University of Otago, New Zealand
1. Preliminaries ; 2. Theoretical Orientation ; 3. Some Basic Notions of Cognitive Grammar ; 4. Syntax in Cognitive Grammar ; 5. The Constituent Structure of Prenominal Possessives ; 6. Prenominal Possessives: Some Generative Approaches ; 7. Specificity and Definiteness of Prenominal Possessives ; 8. Possessors as Topics ; 9. The Cue Validity of the Possessor ; 10. Ing-nominalizations ; 11. Possessive Compounds ; 12. Other Possessive Constructions ; 13. Possession
