Grammatical structures not only have a most phosyntastic form, they are also used to express meaning (semantics) in context-appropriate use (pragmatics). We refer to these as the dimensions of form, meaning and use. Because the three are interrelated—that is, a change in one will involve a change in another—it is helpful to view the three dimensions as a pie chart, with arrows depicting the interaction among the three. | Chapter 16 Reference and Possession We should also mention two special syntactic constructions one using the possessive determiner the other using the possessive pronoun which appear similar yet are slightly different in meaning Philip is one of our friends. Philip is a friend of ours. The first sentence means that we have an unspecified number of friends and that Philip is one of them. The second sentence makes no reference to our other friends but instead means that Philip is our friend and suggests that he may also be a friend of other people. Some reference grammars and ESL EFL texts erroneously state or imply that such sentences are completely synonymous. Nouns marked with the possessive inflection have two main uses 1 they may be definite determiners such as my cousin s father some people s opinions or 2 they may be a modifier more closely associated with the head noun and behave much like part of a compound noun several women s universities a ship s doctor Han 1996 in a data-based study of possessives in spoken English found that about 70 percent of her more than 250 tokens were definite determiners and about 23 percent had the more lexicalized modifier function with the remaining 7 percent representing four other minor functions . We will focus here on the definite determiner use and see how such possessives17 are used in discourse. What types of nouns most typically occur together as inflected possessive determiners and head nouns in oral discourse In her oral corpus Han found that the possessive determiners modifying head nouns were of three types personal names 71 . Bob Mr. Smith example Bob s house personal roles 19 . teacher child example the teacher s report collective or institutional nouns 10 . team the company example the company s report The head nouns modified by possessive determiners were of five types in Han s corpus nouns of internal possession 26 . information problem opinion example Bob s problem personal roles 26 . doctor .
