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Past participle agreement in French has been taken to be conditioned (among other factors) by movement of the internal argument out of the VP, i.e. as a reflex of movement. However, drawing on data that have been neglected so far in the formal literature on the topic (Lahousse 2011), we show that this characterization is in part misguided: past participle agreement is also possible with in-situ internal arguments of unaccusative/passive verbs (that combine with the perfect auxiliary être), and hence cannot generally be considered a reflex of movement. We argue that a unified analysis of all past participle contexts in French is not only difficult - the sole attempt at a uniform analysis of a very similar pattern in Italian by D’Alessandro and Roberts (2008) cannot be extended to French - but also undesirable, because past participle agreement in contexts with the auxiliary avoir differs in a number of properties compared to past participle agreement in contexts that require the auxiliary être. We thus argue that past participle agreement in French is in fact not a homogeneous phenomenon but results from two different mechanisms: agreement between the past participle and the internal argument in its base position (not in a Spec-head configuration as is usually assumed), or from resumption (following a suggestion by Boeckx 2003).

At the heart of this special issue are partitive elements (i. e., partitive articles, partitive pronouns, and partitive case markers) which can express different “shades” of partitivity, namely true partitivity, pseudopartitivity, or indefiniteness, that is, the absence of a part-whole relation in the meaning, in contrast to (pseudo)partitivity. Since these partitive elements express (at least) two such notions, as they can be truly partitive but often are not, the questions around partitivity are complex, interrelated and challenging. This special issue, with a strong and wide crosslinguistic (typological) coverage, deals with two overarching topics: first, the geographical distribution of partitive elements and the identification of potential instances of language contact, and, second, sometimes in combination with the first topic, the formal description and explanation of different partitive constructions.

At the heart of this special issue are partitive elements (i. e., partitive articles, partitive pronouns, and partitive case markers) which can express different “shades” of partitivity, namely true partitivity, pseudopartitivity, or indefiniteness, that is, the absence of a part-whole relation in the meaning, in contrast to (pseudo)partitivity. Since these partitive elements express (at least) two such notions, as they can be truly partitive but often are not, the questions around partitivity are complex, interrelated and challenging. This special issue, with a strong and wide crosslinguistic (typological) coverage, deals with two overarching topics: first, the geographical distribution of partitive elements and the identification of potential instances of language contact, and, second, sometimes in combination with the first topic, the formal description and explanation of different partitive constructions.

We discuss a potential case of borrowing in this paper: Breton a- ‘of’, ‘from’ marking of (internal) verbal arguments, unique in Insular Celtic languages, and reminiscent of Gallo-Romance de/du- (and en-) arguments. Looking at potential Gallo-Romance parallels of three Middle Breton constructions analyzed in some detail (a with indefinite mass nominals in direct object position, a-marking of internal arguments under the scope of negation, a [allomorphs an(ez)-/ahan-] with personal pronouns for internal arguments, subjects (mainly of predicative constructions) and as expletive subjects of existential constructions), we demonstrate that even if there are some semantic parallels and one strong structural overlap (a and de under the scope of negation), the amount of divergences in morphology, syntax and semantics and the only partially fitting relative chronology of the different constructions do not allow to conclude with certainty that language-contact is an explanation of the Breton facts, which might have come into being also because of internal change (bound to restructuring of the pronominal system in Breton). More research is necessary to complete our knowledge of a-marking in Middle Breton and Modern Breton varieties and on the precise history of French en, in order to decide for one or the other explanation.

The liaison consonant [z] in French noun phrases has traditionally been assumed to function as a plural marker. The realization of “plural [z]” in N(oun)-A(djective)-combinations is becoming, however, very rare in naturalistic data – except for contexts which allow a proper-name reading. On the one hand, one might think that we are dealing with a recent phenomenon, the beginning of a potential linguistic change in French in the sense of exaptation, reuse of former morphophonological material such as plural markers to signal proper-namehood in the sense of ‘frozen morphology’. If this turns out correct, we expect the productivity of the new synchronic function to increase: New NA-combinations which function as proper names should be realized systematically with liaison, and proper name-marking via liaison should also become possible with other liaison consonants. On the other hand, we may be dealing with a (completed) diachronic process, in that only those NA-combinations which allowed liaison at the relevant point in time may have a liaison consonant in their univerbalized form. That is, new NA-combinations, even though they are used as proper names, do not display a liaison consonant, because liaison is no longer possible. The purpose of this paper was to investigate, based on empirical studies, whether liaison productively marks NA-combinations which function as proper names and distinguishes them from NA-combinations that count as common nouns, or whether we are dealing with a completed diachronic process. In view of the poor productivity observed, we argue that we are dealing with cases of univerbation.

The aim of this contribution is to reposition a key notion to the centre of Wulf Oesterreicher’s theoretical disciplinary reasoning: grammar, or more generally, ‘rules and norms’ specific to single languages and varieties the linguist deals with. This includes contingent, non-motivated structures, and claiming the necessity to analyse their existence ‘as such’ (i.e., also independently of communicative, social etc. factors) as the core task of linguistics. This point is illustrated with a much debated variable in French descriptive linguistics: past participle agreement. Combining theoretical and corpus linguistic observations, the distribution of the two variants (absence vs. realization of agreement) in constructions with the auxiliary avoir shows that a grammatical analysis interested in the derivation of certain rules and their application in actual language usage permits to understand the logic of linguistic variation - at least the one observable alongside the standard - non-standard opposition in French.

The paper deals with Differential Object Marking in Corsican. After a short introduction, it gives an overview of the main local triggering factors for marking direct objects in general (animacy, referentiality). It then presents the few main assumptions about Corsican DOM in the literature as well as findings of a new corpus study, based on written Corsican texts. Strong personal pronouns and proper names for human referents are consistently marked by the DOM marker à, but toponyms and metonymically used proper names are marked as well. Universal and negative quantifiers with a human denotation are also DOM-marked, whereas all other pronouns are not; thus animacy plays only a minor role in Corsican. The presence of determiners, quantifiers or numerals within nominals excludes the presence of à, irrespective of the nominals' denotation. Non-specific bare nominals are never DOM-marked, also irrespective of the nominals' denotation. The discussion then explains that the Corsican DOM is triggered much more by syntactic definiteness than animacy, a hypothesis strengthened by the most prominent morphosyntactic regularity at work in Corsican: nominals in combination with determiners and quantifiers cannot be marked by the DOM-marker à, even if they denote human beings. The complementary distribution of à and prenominal functional elements requires a further detailed syntactic analysis.