Building and Interpreting Possession Sentences

A wide-ranging generative analysis of the typology of possession sentences, solving long-standing puzzles in their syntax and semantics.

A major question for linguistic theory concerns how the structure of sentences relates to their meaning. There is broad agreement in the field that there is some regularity in the way that lexical semantics and syntax are related, so that thematic roles (the different participant roles in an event- agent, theme, goal, etc.) are predictably associated…