The author provides an in-depth analysis of possessive constructions in English in terms of Cognitive Grammar, as developed by Ronald Langacker and others. The book also provides a wide-ranging critique of alternative analyses, especially those derived from the Chomskyan school.

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.

Few topics in English linguistics match the possessive in richness of construction types, token frequency, and the challenge for both a syntactician and a semanticist. Yet, apart from a number of recent dissertations and a monograph or two, this may be the first full-bore, book-length treatment of the English possessive, which makes Taylor's book a welcome addition to the growing body of literature approaching the syntax-semantics interface . . . it is an excellent starting point, and one which can lead us further into a much-desired convergence of theoretical frameworks.