A Cognitive Grammatical Analysis of Inalienable Possessives in Orwell’s “Animal Farm”

Abstract

The present paper focuses on investigating inalienable possessive constructions as a part of human experience of the world within the framework of cognitive grammar using Heine’s (1997a, 1997b) model. The traditional approaches to language deal with the structure and meaning of possessive constructions as to be determined by a formal rule system and neglect their conventionalized cognitive structure. In English, a possessive construction conceptualizes a range of different semantic relations in a way that referring to all these meanings as “possessive” would be misleading. The paper aims at explaining an assumption that inalienable possessive expressions are combined in chain-like conceptual integration. The paper also focuses on explaining that the grammatical structure of inalienable possessives is predictable once people know the range of conventionalized cognitive structures from which they are derived. Another aim is to show that possession does have a privileged status in the semantics of other different concepts. One of the hypotheses is that the way the two component entities in different inalienable PCs are combined, depends on the conceptual structure of both entities (PR-PM). Another hypothesis is that there are certain highly abstract and complex concepts in the mind of speaker that grammar cannot conceptualize. Such complex concepts are generally structuralized by the structures of some other concrete concepts, which are the event schemas. The paper concludes that the grammatical structures of the randomly occurring possessives are built via the conceptual correspondence between the possessor and possessum with the ability to project concrete concepts onto other less concrete concepts.