Regular and generic possessives in Maltese

Abstract

Recent work on the semantics of possessives has evinced a resurgence of interest in the substantive nature and provenance of the possessive relation (e.g. Barker 1995; Partee and Borschev 1998, 2000a, 2000b; Borschev and Partee 2001; Vikner and Jensen 2002) *. A more systematic account of these relations is made possible by developments in lexical semantic theories, which have given rise to a weakly polymorphic view of the syntax-lexical semantics interface, whereby lexical items are underspecified to some degree, and dependent on the selectional properties of other elements in their immediate syntactic environment (e.g. Pustejovsky 1995, 1998). While various approaches subscribe to some version of these hypotheses, there are important theoretical differences between them with respect to the domain in which knowledge is considered to lie, whether it is encoded in a sort system underlying the lexicon, or whether it is construed as ‘world knowledge’ (cf. Dölling 1995, 1997). This paper endorses the view that the lexicon should be imputed with a limited amount of knowledge, organised as a sort inheritance hierarchy (Pustejovsky 1995). It attempts to extend the approach to possessive relations proposed by Jensen and Vikner (1994, 2004; Vikner and Jensen, 2002), based on the Generative Lexicon, to a particular class of possessive constructions. Such constructions, exemplified by expressions like a women’s magazine, are often ambiguous between a regular, relational interpretation and an alternative ‘modificational’ interpretation. Anticipating the outcome of the analysis, the latter will be referred to as Generic Possessives (GPs). Focusing on data from Maltese, I will show that the possessor NP in these constructions is kind-denoting. I will argue that the GP expresses a relation holding between the entity denoted by the head noun and putative realizations of the kind denoted by the possessor NP.