On a type of uniquely predicative possessive in English dialects
In a number of dialects of English, predominantly in North-Western British English, sentences like (1) have
a possessive meaning:
(1)
John is both of our friends
(1) then means that John is a friend of both the speaker and another relevant individual. This is a rather
peculiar meaning for this structure to have and therefore it becomes important to understand what structural
configuration can compositionally give rise to such a meaning. We begin by investigating in detail the
empirical characteristics of the construction. We find in the first place that the construction in (1) is only
acceptable when it involves clearly relational nouns - typically kinship terms, terms like friend, child (in
the kin sense, and with variations in the degree of acceptability terms that denote part-whole relations
(Barker, 1995). Even with nominalisations we generally observe a continuum of acceptability where the
grammatical end is occupied by the relational nouns, the middle by nouns such as teacher, doctor which,
according to Partee and Borschev (2003) may actually on their way to becoming fully relational, and finally
the ungrammatical end by nouns such as bank-manager, cleaner where the second argument is not necessary.
Turning next to the quantifiers that are allowed in this construction we find that only universals, positive
and negative, can occupy the position of both in (1) with the (not so unexpected) exception of Every. Thus
the data succinctly presented looks like (2):
(2)
⎧
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
John is ⎨
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎩
Both
All
Each
?None
neither
⎧
⎫
Dads
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎫
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
Brothers
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪ ?Teachers
⎪
⎬ both of our ⎨
⎬
?Doctors
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
∗Bank-managers
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎭
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎩ ∗Cleaners
⎭
Finally, we must note that these constructions are only found in predicative positions, i.e. they are grammatical in post-copular positions and small clauses and ungrammatical in argument position. (3) has only
the DP meaning (the two people who are our friends are here):
(3)
Both of our friends are here.
Taking these facts together we build an analysis of the syntax of these constructions based on Kayne (1993,
1994) and his analysis of Saxon and double genitives in English. WE suggest, however, that the origin of
sentences in (1) is a simple post-nominal genitive like A friend of John. Evidence for this comes from the fact
that post-nominal genitives, just like the constructions under investigation show sensitivity to the relational
character of the noun (Peters and Westerståhl, 2006)
(4)
A friend/*car of John
The outline of the syntactic derivation that we propose (assuming that relational nouns are argument taking)
is as follows (for (1)) we also assume that Our is a spell out of the varphi feature set [+PL, 1st person] (us
below) and the possessive morpheme under adjacency
(5)
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
Merge [N Friends] and [QP Both us] → [N P Friends [QP Both us]]
Merge Poss → [P ossP ’s [N P Friends [QP Both us]]]
Move QP to [spec PossP] → [P ossP [QP Both us] [P oss′ ’s [N P Friends [ QP Both us]]]]
Merge D[−def ] and insert of →
[DP D[−def ] of [P ossP [P oss′ [QP Both us] ’s [N P Friends [ QP Both us]]]]]
Raise QP to Spec D →
[DP [QP Both][D′ D[−def ] of [P ossP [P oss′ [ QP Both us] ’s [N P Friends [ QP Both us]]]]]
Note that in the derivation above the abstract pronoun us is omitted from the final position of the QP as
it is pronounced in the intermediate position after post-syntactic morphological merger with the possessive
morpheme resulting in our.
1
This derivation, which is very close to Kayne’s original proposal does not, however, yield directly the
requisite meaning. For this we need to turn to the semantics of the construction. There are to key aspects
to the semantics, first that the relational noun is lexically represented as a two place predicate ([[f riend]]
= λxλy[friend(x, y)]). The second key aspect of the analysis is the plausible assumption that the meaning
and type of the quantifier is not the one that it has when in it occurs in typical D positions but rather the
meaning that it has in floated positions (that of a distributive operator essentially). So for Both we have:
(6)
[[Both]] = λXλRλy[∀x, x ∈ X → R(x, y) ∧ ∣X∣ = 2]
In other words a two place operator that combines with a plural noun (Us) and a relation (the possessive)
to yield a predicate of individuals. The semantic derivation proceeds as follows (we have simplified slightly
the representations by focussing on the distributivity of the internal /first argument of Friends):
(7)
λXλRλy[∀x, x ∈ X → R(x, y) ∧ ∣X∣ = 2] ([[us]]) = λRλy[∀x, x ∈ us → R(x, y) ∧ ∣us∣ = 2]
The resulting constituent is of type ⟨⟨e, ⟨e, t⟩⟩, ⟨e, t⟩⟩ and combines with the relational noun, which we have
taken to be precisely of type ⟨e, ⟨e, t⟩⟩. As a result, the combination has the following result (8):
(8)
[[Both-Us]]([[Friends]]) = λRλy[∀x, x ∈ us → R(x, y) ∧ ∣us∣ = 2](friends′ ) = λy[∀x, x ∈ us →
f riends(x, y) ∧ ∣us∣ = 2]
The last part in (8) expresses the property of being someone who is, separately, a friend of both individuals
making up the group Us.
(9)
[[’s]]([[NP]])= λR[R](λy[∀x, x ∈ us → f riends(x, y) ∧ ∣us∣ = 2]) = λy[∀x, x ∈ us → f riends(x, y) ∧
∣us∣ = 2]
This is the meaning of the full both of our friends constituent. AS can be seen this is of predicative type
and therefore explains why these constituents can only appear in predicative positions.
Finally introducing the DP John (omitting the copula), completes the derivation.
(10)
[[DP]]([[John]]) = λy[∀x, x ∈ us → f riends(x, y)∧∣us∣ = 2]([[John]]) = ∀x, x ∈ us → f riends(x, John)∧
∣us∣ = 2
Of course, (10) is exactly the meaning of the sentence (1) We have thus arrived at what seems to be the
correct account of this construction based on fairly standard assumptions. In the final part of the paper we
will address one residual issue and one issue of wider context. First we address the number agreement that is
found on the noun. There is no plural controller for the agreement on the noun and yet, although a minority
of speakers accepts also the singular version, the plural is seen as the best version of these sentences. As a
possible explanation, we note that with nouns such as friend and other so-called set-predicates agreement
patterns are variable. We tentatively attribute the plural on the inherent distributivity of these constructions.
Finally we attempt to link this type of construction to other properties of the North Western British English
dialects in order to understand its absence in other dialects.
References
Barker, C. (1995). Possessive Descriptions. Stanford, California: CSLI Publications.
Kayne, R. (1993). Towards a modular theory of auxiliary selection. Studia Linguistica 47, 3–31.
Kayne, R. (1994). The Antisymmetry of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Partee, B. H. and V. Borschev (2003). Genitives, relational nouns, and argument-modifier ambiguity. In
E. Lang, C. Maienborn, and C. Fabricius-Hansen (Eds.), Modifying Adjuncts, Volume 4 of Interface Explorations, pp. 67–112. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Peters, S. and D. Westerståhl (2006). Quantifiers in Language and Logic. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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