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3. NOMINAL COMPLEMENTATION AND ARGUMENT STRUCTURE<br />

(61) a. John humiliated/embarrassed the audience.<br />

b. The joke humiliated/embarrassed the audience.<br />

c. John’s humiliation/embarrassment of the audience.<br />

d. *The joke’s humiliation/embarrassment of the audience.<br />

According to Grimshaw (1990: 138) the ungrammaticality of (61d) is explained in terms of<br />

argument structure. In other words, the possessive is only allowed if the nominal has an<br />

agentive reading. However, in (61d) there is no agent, as joke functions as the Theme. This<br />

is the reason why the NP is ungrammatical.<br />

With respect to the function of possessives in the structure of NPs, the most<br />

common functions attributed to them are those of determiners, subjects and subjectoids.<br />

Biber et al. (1999: 270-271) think of possessives as determiners of the NP since they<br />

“specify a noun phrase by relating it to the speaker/writer (my, our), the addressee (your)<br />

or other entities mentioned in the text or given in the speech situation (his, her, its, their).”<br />

In other words, they “make noun phrases definite.”<br />

Payne and Huddleston (2002: 472) refer to possessives as subject-determiner<br />

genitives, and argue that they combine the syntactic functions of determiner and subject.<br />

On the one hand, they are mutually exclusive with the basic determiners. On the other, as<br />

already noted, these genitives bear many structural and semantic resemblances with the<br />

subject in a sentence. For instance, the genitive precedes the head in the NP as the subject<br />

precedes the head in the sentence. Furthermore, the range of semantic relations between<br />

the genitive and the head in the NP is parallel to the semantic relations found between the<br />

subject and the predicate in a sentence (see Payne and Huddleston 2002: 472-474).<br />

More recently, De Smet (2010: 1168) has pointed out that previous analyzes of the<br />

possessive as a determiner or as a subject are problematic. If possessives are analyzed as<br />

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