Nick Fleisher (U-Wisconsin Milwaukee)

English own-possessives (my own pencil, her own car, etc.), relatively understudied in the possessives literature, turn out to have a number of surprising properties. Syntactically, they behave like anaphors. Semantically, they frequently behave like indefinites, even when appearing with a definite possessor phrase. These properties coexist alongside the (frequent but not obligatory) focus association that has been observed for other languages' counterparts of own (as in Charnavel's work on French propre). In this talk I canvass the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of English own-possessives and situate them within the broader literature on possessives.