RT list: "possessive"

-----Original Message-----
From: Paulo Sousa <p.sousa@qub.ac.uk>
To: relevance@linguistics.ucl.ac.uk <relevance@linguistics.ucl.ac.uk>
Sent: Sun, Jan 10, 2010 3:48 pm
Subject: RT list: help on possessive pronou(n)s

Dear all,

Happy new year! I'm looking for current work on the semantics and
pragmatics of possessive pronoums ...
... my interest is quite general. I just want to know about work that
discusses the range of meanings that pronouns like "my" can help to
convey in different contexts, and if there is any sense in claiming
that these pronouns have some stable semantic feature that remains
constant across contexts.

-- Well, I think Dionysios, or whoever it was that invented
"possessive" had it wrong. As _I_ use "possessive" it´s always wrong
(possessive love) or over-classy (the haves and the have nots). You
cannot blame the genitive here, which was indeed a "general" category
originally, for a good thing about the possessive pronoun is that it´s
not genitive. So let´s consider:

-- my point about Wittgenstein´s Poker not being his, and McEvoy´s
reply that he possessed it and thus owned it is perhaps a good one, in
that grammatical distinctions do not necessarily cover all our
conceptual distinctions worth making (contra Grice who exclaimed to
Warnock, "How clever language is!" -- "for it made for us all the
distintions we needed", Warnock, "Saturday Mornings").

So there possibly _is_ some sense in talk of ´possession´ here. But I
wouldn´t know. In the case of the possessive pronouns analyzed by Grice
in Personal Identity (Mind, 1941) regarding one´s body, it does seem a
stretch (His body was hit by a ball; Tom was hit by a ball -- his own
ball, as it happened).

Why is it that there is only THREE persons that can get possessives. I
saw "It´s complicated", and one line I loved is between S. Martin
(playing the architect) and Streep playing the ... American baker.

  "I have one comment to make on your blueprint.
  None of that his and hers bullsh*t in my bakery"

Point taken, he says --after one gaffe or two. So why is it that we
have to distinguish the gender of the possessor rather than the thing
possessed in English, unlike all Romance Graeco-Latin languages? Thor
knows! (Note that to have a neutral toiled labelled "Theirs" won´t
really do. Trust they´ll -- the Americans? -- will bring their dogs
in!).

-- You have, "I, me, mine", to use the title of George Harrison´s song.
One possessive too many. As the song goes, "the best things in life, to
you were just loaned, so tell me how can you lose what you never
owned?". Sincerely, Paulo, what things do you hold _yours_, or to put
it in correcter English, _thine_?

(Name me one and I´ll rebut you! And "patience" and "temper" are NOT
allowed -- they are uncountable, so I, for one, cannot _count_ on
them!)

Cheers,

J. L. Speranza
  for the Grice Circle, &c.
Received on Sun Jan 10 23:30:38 2010