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The distinction mass - count nouns has always been long discussed by grammarians due to their difficulty in finding a homogenous point of view. The present study aims to clarify the different interpretations of massive nouns, laying stress on their individualized “reading”. Starting from different occurrences of massive nouns there has been established the role played by the indefinite article a/ an in structures comprising a massive entity.

Livonian like other Finnic languages has a complex morphological system. Unlike, e.g., Finnish and Estonian, Livonian has not been systematically ­standardised and thus exhibits vast variability in usage. This article discusses the results of a morphosyntactic corpus analysis of the Livonian jussive mood. The article presents previous research on the Livonian jussive, formal aspects of jussive occurrences in the corpus, and an analysis of arguments of the jussive predicates. Jussive object marking is given more attention due to the ambiguity of case marking in Livonian, namely, nominative and genitive (sometimes even partitive) forms frequently ­coincide. A possible interpretation of the ambiguous cases is suggested based on their usage and restrictions.

The article deals with the way in which partitive meaning was expressed in genitive constructions in the 16th-century Russian language. It focuses on the problem of codependence between partitive meaning and the genitive inflection -u, correlation between the inflections -a/-u, and the semantics of nouns which took the inflection -u in the 16th-century administrative files.

THE PARTITIVE GENITIVE OF QUANTITY IN 19th CENTURY DIALECT TEXTS COLLECTED BY A. BARANAUSKAS AND K. BRUGMANNSummaryAll the measure nouns found in the Eastern and Western High Lithuanian Kauniškiai dialect texts were divided into five subtypes. The abstract quantity nouns and the conventionalized measures usually govern the postposed partitive genitive. The placement of the partitive genitive may vary in the phrases with the nouns that have the meaning of containers and fractions (parts). The partitive genitives are usually postposed in complex phrases (tukstantis baczku smałos ‘(one) thousand barrels of pitch’; szventįto vandenio butelis ‘a bottle of sanctified water’). Words such as pusantro ‘one and a half’, pusė ‘a half’ are closely connected with numerals in their meaning and usage. The nouns lysė, ‘a bed’, dirva ‘ground (a field)’, lopinys ‘a piece’ can obtain the meaning of quantifiers when they describe different areas (sectors) of land.The postposition of the partitive genitive predominates (71-78 per cent) in these texts. The use of the preposed genitive in sequences with nouns denoting quantity makes up about a quarter of the occurrences, but in some of these the initial position is conditioned not by the quantity meaning, but rather by the meaning of purpose or definition. For Kauniškiai dialect texts the meaning of purpose in sentences with preposed genitives is in general not usual. That is, the position of the genitive in such sentences is not always connected with differences of meaning. The variation in the position of the genitive (especially in the Kauniškiai texts) is more closely connected with neutral or marked word order in the phrase. Therefore the use of preposed genitives is stipulated by three factors, namely, (a) the attributive meaning of the phrase (denoting purpose, definition, possession); (b) the marked word order in the phrase; (c) the alternation of the intonation in the sentence.Phrases with a postpositive genitive in the Kauniškiai texts can have a partitive meaning which is not significant. In these phrases the naming of the object expressed by the postpositive genitive as an entirety is more important.The content of quantity in the texts studied can be described as having three different possible sequences: (a) noun of quantity and postpositive genitive (maišas linų ‘bag of flax’); (b) noun of quantity and preposed genitive (linų maišas ‘bag of flax’ [literally *’of flax a bag’]); noun of quantity and a construction with su ‘with’ (maišas su linais ‘bag with flax’).The position of the attributive genitives and the genitives of quantity did not differ much as the word order in the attribute phrase of this period was not strictly defined.

GENITIVE OF QUANTITY: GRAMMATICAL GOVERNMENT AND SEMANTICSSummaryGenitives governed by lexical units of quantity and partitive genitives are used in the same syn­tactical positions, that of the subject and that of the direct object. Although both definite and inde­finite quantity can be expressed by lexical units which govern a genitive, grammatical concord is observed only in the expressions of definite quantity (cf. dešimt vyrų, and devyni vyrai), whereas indefinite quantity is expressed by the partitive genitive. However, the use of the genitive is deter­mined not by the opposition of definite quantity vs. indefinite quantity, but by the opposition of part vs. whole. The marked member of the latter opposition is the partitive genitive, the unmarked member being the objective accusative or the subjective nominative.In Lithuanian the part—whole opposition is considerably restricted by the semantic peculiarities of the verb, its actants and the linguistic context. The partitive genitive occurs in the position of the subject only with existential or motion verbs. Yet the partitive genitive is much more frequent in Lithuanian than, for instance, in Russian.As the part—whole opposition is in essence a quantitative opposition, there is no reason why we should speak about the expression of zero quantity or introduce a zero quantitative seme.

The present paper reports the results of one part of a study conducted on the native language of three Estonian-English bilingual children living in Britain. This part focuses on object case marking. The study found that the native language of these children demonstrated English influence in their systematic overuse of the partitive to mark direct objects in Estonian. The plausibility of regarding this as a transfer effect is supported by two considerations. First, the children have limited exposure to Estonian speakers in England, so that English has become their dominant language. Second, the children’s simplification of object marking patterns conforms to the much simpler English pattern. The primary subjects were asked to translate 40 English sentences (with 43 object contexts) into Estonian. A set of Estonian control subjects were given a completion task with the same sentences in Estonian. The results of the study revealed that the primary subjects overwhelmingly used the partitive in marking direct objects, even in contexts where either the genitive or nominative marking was required. The control subjects demonstrated a consistent use of the three object cases in appropriate contexts.

Some Features in the Expression of the Noun Determination. Comparison Between Five Romance Languages. In this article we would like to compare the noun determination in five Romance languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian). All the languages examined here share the main uses of articles: known referent, generic use, unique entities, abstract names, inalienable possession for the definite article, or introduction of a new element into the discourse and description for the indefinite article. However, we wanted to show some peculiarities. We used the same text in five languages, (La sombra del viento, Carlos Ruiz Zafón) which is part of the RomCro corpus, composed in the Chair of Romance Linguistics of the Department of Romance Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Zagreb, Croatia. The results of the analysis showed a clear difference between French and the other languages. As expected, French uses the indefinite article in plural much more often, as well as the partitive article, which does not exist in Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian. Likewise, the possessive adjective is more common in French than in other languages which use the definite article instead. But what is particularly interesting are the differences which indicate a "change of perspective", namely a different kind of article than in the original text. Our conclusion is that the noun can have several characteristics at the same time (description or determination by complement, generic use or absence of specific referent etc.) of which the author (or the translator) chooses the one to highlight. Likewise, we have underlined the role of article zero, which can carry different values (unspecified referent, but also unspecified quantity or even definite article value if the noun is introduced by a preposition), depending on its relationship to other articles in the language. REZUMAT. Unele particularităţi în exprimarea determinării substantivului. comparație între cinci limbi romanice. În studiul nostru, am dori să comparăm determinarea substantivului în cinci limbi romanice (franceză, spaniolă, portugheză, italiană şi română). Toate limbile examinate aici ilustrează principalele utilizări ale articolelor: referent cunoscut, utilizare generică, entități unice, nume abstracte, posesie inalienabilă pentru articolul hotărât sau introducerea unui nou element în discurs și descrierea pentru articolul nehotărât. Cu toate acestea, am vrut să arătăm anumite trăsături structurale. Pentru aceasta, am folosit același text pentru cele cinci limbi (La sombra del viento, Carlos Ruiz Zafón), care face parte din corpusul RomCro, realizat la Catedra de lingvistică romanică a Departamentului de Romanistică, Facultatea de Filosofie şi Litere, Universitatea din Zagreb, Croația. Rezultatele analizei au arătat o diferență clară între franceză și celelalte limbi. Așa cum era de așteptat, franceza folosește mult mai frecvent articolul nehotărât la plural și, bineînțeles, articolul partitiv, care nu există în spaniolă, în portugheză și în română. De asemenea, adjectivul posesiv este mai frecvent în franceză decât în alte limbi care folosesc, în schimb, articolul hotărât. Dar ceea ce este deosebit de interesant sunt diferențele care indică o „schimbare de perspectivă”, și anume un alt tip de articol decât în textul original. Concluzia noastră este că substantivul poate avea mai multe caracteristici în același timp (descriere sau determinare prin complement, utilizare generică sau absența unui referent specific etc.), dintre care autorul (sau traducătorul) o alege pe cea pe care vrea să o evidențieze. De asemenea, am relevat rolul articolului zero, care poate avea valori diferite (referent nespecificat, dar și cantitate neprecizată sau chiar valoare de articol hotărât, dacă substantivul este introdus de o prepoziție), în funcție de relaţia sa cu alte articole în limbă. Cuvinte-cheie: articol, franceză, spaniolă, portugheză, italiană, română.

THE PREPOSITIVE ADNOMINAL GENITIVE IN BALTIC, BALTO-FINNIC AND SCANDINAVIAN LANGUAGES: A HISTORICAL SURVEY Summary The article deals with the parallel preposited adnominal non-partitive genitive in Bal­tic, Balto-Finnic and Scandinavian languages from the point of view of diachrony, areal linguistics and language typology where the latter perspective is based mostly on Greenberg's language universals. Data from Scandinavian historical syntax (Braunmüller's stu­dies in word order) reveal a far more complex picture concerning the historical roots of the preposited genitive in the Nordic languages than one can observe from the smooth surface of to-day's Swedish, Danish and Norwegian which corresponds so neatly with the Baltic and Balto-Finnic languages with respect to the phenomenon in question.