Specialized education of the republic ofuzbekistan termez state university foreign philology faculty

Conclusion
In this paper we set out to investigate the underresearched issue of the discourse status of the possessive referent of possessive NPs in English. We investigated the ways in which this referent can be an initial or non-initial mention, paying attention to how it interacts with previously given information in extensive discourse contexts. We demonstrated that a binary distinction between given and new does not suffice to capture its discourse status, and proposed instead a continuum of discourse statuses, ranging from fully discourse-given to fully discourse-new over a number of in-between statuses in which the possessee is only partially given. Our analysis has the following major implications.
Firstly, our analysis reviews and refines the description of English possessive NPs in a number of ways. We have shown that possessive NPs cannot be analyzed as mere definite NPs which presuppose the identifiability of their referent. A number of possessive NPs are functionally indefinite, which argues for a covert definite-indefinite contrast in English. Building on earlier analyses of possessive NPs as complex NPs with two distinct referents among which an NP-internal relation of identification exists, we have shown that this NP-internal identification mechanism is distinct from the external discourse functioning of each of the two referents of the possessive NP.
Whereas the discourse status of the possessor referent is straightforward (it is given with possessive determiners and with definite genitives, and new with indefinite genitives), the discourse status of the possessee referent is controversial and has remained underresearched empirically. Against the view of Taylor (who, projecting the asymmetric reference-point relation internal to NPs onto their discourse behaviour, predicts that possessees are overwhelmingly discourse-new and anchored to a typically given possessor), we have shown that fully discourse-new possessive referents represent only a relatively small portion (28%) of the data. Possessive referents may also be ‘anchored’ to elements in the preceding text, which reduce its newness but do not make it recoverable in a strict sense. In the majority of the cases, however, the possessee is given at least to some extent. It may be retrievable from extended descriptions, quotes or reports in the surrounding discourse, and it may be inferable from a given referent or other element in the preceding discourse. In a small but significant number of cases, finally, the possessee turned out to be fully given, in the sense of being coreferential with a given discourse referent.
The analysis of possessive NPs proposed in this paper has theoretical implications as well. In particular, it adds a systematic discourse perspective to the theory of reference-point construction , which has always focused on the NP-internal reference-point relation. We have shown that possessive NPs cannot be studied in isolation, without taking account of the discourse context in which they occur. By studying possessives in extensive discourse contexts, we have revealed that the reference-point mechanism may be employed in various ways, adapted to specific discourse purposes. For instance, possessive NPs may be used to guarantee referential clarity by their explicit link to the possessor or to reactivate the possessor as topic, and they may be employed to recategorize existing referents, or to label text referents. In this way, our analysis has shown that the possessive is a versatile and complex NP type, whose identificatory potential as a reference-point construction can only be fully uncovered by taking its discourse functions into account.