Identifying Participants Using Possessive "Pronouns"

Martin & Rose (2007: 160):

Another important resource for identifying participants is possessive pronouns. These pronouns (my, your, her, his, its, our, their) work like a, some, the, this, that, these, those, to tell us which participant we are talking about. In her story, Helena introduces her girlfriends, their police friends and the Africans' leaders in this way:

all my girlfriends
and three of our friends
their leaders

As well as people, the possessions and parts of people can all be presented and presumed with this resource, for example, his throat, my head. 

There are actually two identities in these expressions; one is realised by the possessive pronoun (e.g. my) and the other by the thing that is ‘possessed’ (e.g. girlfriends). The possessive pronoun always presumes an identity, but the thing that is ‘possessed’ may or may not have been previously mentioned.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, in SFL Theory, these are known as 'possessive determiners' (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 382, 623, 627).

[2] To be clear, only 3rd person forms function cohesively as reference items (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 628). For the cohesive component of 'exclusive' we/our/ours, see Halliday & Hasan (1976: 49-50).

[3] To be clear, non-specific determiners, like a and some, do not presume a recoverable identity, because they are non-specific. Their inclusion in Martin's system of identification — 'the semantics of reference' — derives from his confusion of nominal group deixis with cohesive reference.

[4] To be clear, the identities presumed by my, our and their are not the participants introduced. This discrepancy derives from confusing nominal group deixis, where a determiner sub-classifies the Thing of a nominal group, with cohesive reference, where a determiner signals a recoverable identity elsewhere in the text.

[5] To be clear, the relation between people and their parts is one of lexical cohesion, meronymy, not reference.

[6] To be clear, the two "identities" in such nominal groups are (a) that which is referred to by the possessive determiner and (b) that which the Thing realises. Only the determiner refers in the sense of textual reference; the Thing of a nominal group refers in the sense of ideational denotation. The confusion here is one of metafunction.