Possessives in English

This book is about a single morpheme - the possessive morpheme - in English. Often realized as 's, it occurs in a variety of constructions (the man's hat, a friend of mine, without my saying so, a girls' school). What does the morpheme actually mean? What category does it belong to? What is its contribution to the meaning of the expression in which it occurs? And how can we account for the various restrictions on its use?

Dr Taylor proposes a unitary account of the morpheme, within the theoretical framework of Cognitive Grammar. In the earlier chapters he introduces and explains the conceptual apparatus of the theory, and in the later chapters he develops a coherent account of the full range of possessive constructions.

A special feature of this book is that it also provides a wide-ranging critique of alternative, and especially Government and Binding accounts of possessive expression, highlighting the profound conceptual differences between the contrasting approaches as well as some of the points of convergence.