Proposing a unitary account of the possessive morpheme, this work takes "Cognitive Grammar", as developed by Ronald Langacker as its theoretical framework. It introduces the conceptual apparatus of the theory, and develops an account of the full range of possessive constructions in English.
Few topics in English linguistics match the possessive in richness of construction types, token frequency, and the lenge 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.