Search

This article discusses the development of the contrastive-partitive function of the possessive =ešin colloquial Persian. Examples of colloquial Persian show that the third person singular clitic pronoun =ešin some adnominal possessive constructions does not refer to any obvious referent present either in the syntactic structure (co-text) or in the situational context. Instead, the function of =eš, namely contrastive-partitive, is to mark the host as a part and contrast it with other parts of the similar set. The same function is attested in a few languages of Uralic and Turkic group. We believe that the same development has been occurred in possessive =ešin Persian. To describe the process of the development of the contrastive-partitive function, authentic colloquial examples from Internet blogs and formal examples from a historical corpus of New Persian are investigated. It is argued that this non-possessive function of =ešhas originated from the whole-part relation in cross-referencing possessives, where both the lexical and clitical possessor =ešare present. The presence of the lexical possessor facilitates the loss of referentiality in =ešand it is developed to denote partitivity. Furthermore, the pragmatic motivation of communicating contrast makes =ešto be further grammaticalized into denoting contrastive-partitive function.

We very warmly dedicate this volume to the memory of Edit Doron, Anita Mittwoch and Susan Rothstein for their inspiring and outstanding contribution to research on tense, aspect and verb meanings.

In this article we analyze partitive objects under negation (NPOs) in the Northern Italian dialectal (NID) domain and discuss their diachronic and synchronic relation with both partitive constructions and partitive articles. We take into exam the areal distribution of the phenomenon, its syntactic variation and the different factors that regulate this variation. The main claim of the paper is that NPOs in the NIDs are a special type of grammaticalized partitive constructions, where negation licenses a silent quantifier and the preposition expresses extraction from a ‘whole’. In other words, the development of NPOs is similar to that of partitive articles, but they have not lost the partitive meaning. This explains why they appear only with plurals and singular mass nouns.

The traditional philological literature on Sardinian claims that Sardinian has a “partitive object” construction, arguing that it is either inherited from Latin or due to Catalan influence. Under closer examination, however, the construction at issue turns out to be a common Romance clitic right dislocation (CLRD) structure involving the prepositiondeand a partitive clitic. The article presents the syntactic distribution of this Sardinian construction and its clitic left dislocation (CLLD) counterpart and compares it to similar structures in French, Catalan, and Italian. The result is that the structure appears in all these languages when a bare NP is dislocated, including split-QP/NumP/NP constructions: In all these languages, the dislocated indefinite NP is marked byde/diand a partitive clitic (Sardiniannde, Frenchen, Italianne, Catalanen/ne) shows up. The article ends with a Minimalist analysis, in which clitics are the spell-out of a probe in v that triggers movement of a complement to the specifier of vP to overcome a phase boundary. In this account, a probe that targets indefinite NPs assigns partitive case, while the probe itself is spelled out as a partitive clitic. While taking Sardinian as a starting point, the article bears on more general issues and unveils a common mechanism in one group of Romance languages.

This paper explores the hypothesis of contact-induced change for the rise of the partitive case in Finnic languages and of the partitive case/determiner in Basque. On the basis of the well-established Indo-European partitive-genitive case and taking into account the lack of such a basis on the Uralic side, we argue that the partitive case in Finnic languages has arisen as a result of Balto-Slavic influence. Concerning the Basque partitive determiner, we likewise suggest a contact scenario (with Romance languages) as being responsible for the development of an entire system of determiners, including the definite and possibly the indefinite article as well as the partitive marker, which originates in an old ablative ending but crucially lacks the morphological properties characteristic of Basque inflectional markers.

This article takes a usage-based perspective on the partitive genitive construction in Dutch (iets moois, ‘something beautiful’), which has previously drawn scholarly attention from a theoretical perspective, due to the challenges it presents to Dutch nominal morphosyntax. We will argue that a good understanding of the construction at issue cannot circumvent the enormous variation in the expression of the genitive marker. Within the wide variation space, regular patterns can be discerned, which we uncovered by using mixed-effects logistic regression. This approach allows us to assess the precise contribution of internal factors (e.g. length of the adjective, or the type of quantifier) and external factors (e.g. regional variety, or register), as well as their interactions. This article has three objectives then: first, it wants to contribute to the description of Dutch syntax, second it aspires to advance methodological standards in grammatical investigation, and third, it makes a theoretical plea for a usage-based perspective, with full recognition of variation.

This paper analyzes the role of the interaction between syntax and semantics in determining the mixed agreement patterns shown by Spanish partitive constructions when they appear as subjects. These patterns follow straightforwardly from the dual nature of nominal features (concord and index features organized in bundles) and from the assumption that Agree is a feature-valuation process in which the unvalued features of a Probe seek matching parallel valued features of a Goal under locality constraints and a maximization principle. After discussing previous approaches and justifying our syntactic analysis, we demonstrate that interaction for agreement between syntax and semantics is articulated via the nominal index features of the head nouns in the partitive structure, so singular and plural agreement, linked to the valuation/non-valuation of the number index feature, correlates with a group/atomic entity vs. a plurality/distributive reading, respectively, the meaning of the verbal predicate also being relevant. The empirical basis for this analysis is provided by a corpus search whose results are carefully described in the paper.

The present paper aims to investigate the main semantic-functional and discursive properties of partitives on the bases of the bare (independent) partitive genitive in Ancient Greek. Contrary to previous views that the bare partitive genitive (b-PG) primarily encodes the part-of-relation I claim that this meaning of the b-PG has been lost in Ancient Greek. Instead, I claim that the b-PG encodes undetermined instantiations of a set descriptive and restrictive in nature and compatible with kind- or subkind-referring NPs/DPs. It allows the speaker to make no commitment as to the quantity, referentiality and semantic role of these instantiation(s); this/these instantiation(s) have inherently narrow scope (e.g. with negation). These semantic properties determine the discursive function of the b-PG. I claim that the b-PG detracts the focus of attention from the actual participant and links it to the descriptive set or kind/subkind this participant belongs to; the actual participant is extremely backgrounded and its reference is never stored in the discourse model. The b-PG allows the speaker to zoom out from the actual participant and view it schematically in terms of one of its hypercategories (subkind, kind, characterizing/descriptive set). This function of the b-PG explains its frequent occurrence with the verbs of consumption or desire. It explains, furthermore, its use in the predicative position and in headings. As to the diachronic perspective, it is claimed that the foregroundedness of the respective hypercategory and extreme backgroundedness of the subset indicate that the b-PG develops semantically towards pseudo-partitivity.

In this paper, we argue for an approach to grammatical case that treats case-marking not as the passive realisation of other morpho-syntactic properties of a construction, but as bringing its own independent contribution to the con- strual of a clause, through inference over possibly underspecified semantic con- tent of a case-marker in context. We take as case studies two instances of Differ - ential Case-Marking: the partitive alternation in Estonian and differential uses of the marker ko in Hindi/Urdu. For Estonian, it is argued that the partitive case is semantically partitive even in alternation in grammatical contexts with nomina- tive and genitive. From this assumption, we derive the various construals of the partitive as indicating indefinite quantity or imperfective aspect and show how other uses of the case, including after negation, may be traced to the basic parti- tive interpretation. We also argue that the completive interpretations of nomina- tive and genitive derive from contrast with the partitive reading, rather than as being encoded in the case marking itself. With Hindi/Urdu 'dative' maker ko, we argue how pragmatic inference can operate also over grammatical levels to explain the uses of the marker with human direct objects, to specify definite- ness of inanimate direct objects and, in alternation with ergative ne, deontic modality.

This paper examines the syntactic behaviour of French Event Nominals (henceforth ENs), that is, nouns resulting from verb nominalization, and that of their complements. Our main claim is that the syntactic behaviour of such nouns (obligatory complements and regular use of definite determiners) does not result from their deverbal character, as originally suggested by Grimshaw (1990), but is simply due to the fact that they regularly occur as lexical heads of possessive DPs (Szabolcsi 1981, Kayne 1993, Zribi-Hertz 1998). Our analysis is supported by syntactic evidence (pronominalization vs possessive determiners) as well as semantic observations (partitive reading). We also suggest that the shifting operation hypothesized by Grimshaw (1990), which turns Complex ENs into Simple ENs, does in fact shift a mass EN into a count one. After establishing these fundamental observations, we then turn towards an examination of the properties of EN complements. We show that, when they vary for number, EN bare complements are understood as mass or plural nouns, but cannot be interpreted as singular, a property reminiscent of semantically incorporated nominals (Farkas & De Swart 2003). We also show that such nominals display the other recognized properties of pseudo-incorporated nominals, both semantic (narrow scope) and syntactic (adjacency, reduced modification). We then suggest that pseudo-incorporation into nouns is an option available in the grammar of French. The last part of the paper is dedicated to a syntactic analysis of DPs headed by ENs. Basing our analysis on cross-linguistic data, we first claim that any noun may be dominated by a Rel(ational) P(rojection) turning it into a relational noun (Heller 2002). In French, the head of RelP is realized by de. The Specifier position of RelP is the merging site of nominal dependencies occurring into DPs. When such dependencies are DPs, an Agr(eement) Projection insuring their case-checking is inserted above RelP. No such projection is present when a NP is inserted into the structure. The advantage of the analysis suggested in the paper is that it provides a unified syntactic analysis for ENs as well as simple nominals, as well as for possessive and incorporating DPs.

Definiteness has often been assumed to play a role in syntax, most notably in relation to various definiteness effects and case alternations (Belletti 1988; De Hoop 1992; and many others). The question whether this involves a semantic property that is relevant in syntax, or an independent syntactic representation of definiteness, remains to a large extent unanswered. This paper shows that, on the one hand, Hebrew provides independent evidence for assuming a definiteness feature in syntax, and on the other hand, this formal definiteness does not simply correlate with semantic definiteness, and there is no simple one-to-one mapping between the two kinds of definiteness. The second part of this paper focuses on the Hebrew object marker et, which appears only in front of DPs having the syntactic definiteness feature. I argue that et' fulfills a requirement for structural case that Hebrew verbs cannot assign, and that this requirement is related to the representation of definiteness as a formal feature and not to any semantic property. In this light I consider Belletti's (1988) theory of abstract partitive and show that Hebrew object marking seems to provide evidence against it.

En russe, le cas partitif ne peut pas etre utilise avec un verbe a l'aspect imperfectif. Si l'on remplace le perfectif par un imperfectif, il faut aussi remplacer le partitif par un accusatif. Toutefois, dans certains cas, il est impossible de remplacer le perfectif par un imperfectif. Dans cet article, l'A. tente d'expliquer ces cas en examinant les traits semantiques du contexte dans lequel ils apparaissent

This paper investigates the semantic properties of partitive constructions in Italian and Latin. Two basic realizations of partitivity are discussed, depending on the way the partition operation is performed on noun phrase denotations, that is, depending on the characterization of the part-whole relation: they will be called

n/a