Possessives in English: An Exploration in Cognitive Grammar - Tapa blanda

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))

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.