Thursday 1 October 2015

Misconstruing Location (Enhancement) As Possession (Extension)

Martin (1992: 305):
A further distinction can be drawn between alienable and inalienable part/whole relations.  These are not grammatically distinguished in English possessive constructions (e.g. the front garden's trees and the car's boot).  But when the whole is realised as a qualifier, inalienable possessives favour the preposition of, whereas alienable ones are more likely to be introduced with locative prepositions such as in, inside, within etc.
Table 5.6. Alienable and inalienable possession
alienable
(the tree in the garden)
inalienable
(the boot of the car)
garden:tree::
tree:boot::
room:chair::
room:wall::
stream:fish::
fish:gills::
car:spare tire::
car:boot::
cup:coffee
cup:handle

Blogger Comments:

[1] In SFL theory, composition (meronymy) and possession are two distinct subtypes of the expansion category extension (see Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 146).  Here possession is presented as a subtype of composition.   That is, it misconstrues two SFL co-hyponyms as related by hyponymy.

[2] Here the relation of alienable possession (extension) is confused with the relation of location (enhancement).