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The agreement of collective DPS in Romanian

  • Blanca Croitor and Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin
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Romance Linguistics 2010
This chapter is in the book Romance Linguistics 2010

Abstract

Romanian collective nouns do not allow plural agreement on the verb, unlike in British English. But when a collective noun is used with a partitive quantifier (e.g. o parte din guvern “part of the government”), plural agreement is possible. We propose an analysis for partitive quantification, which can account for plural agreement with partitive collectives, as well as with partitive plural DPs (o parte dintre studenţi “part of the students”). Our analysis is based on Higginbotham’s (1994) analysis of mass and plural D-quantifiers. Quantification is construed in terms of amounts of minimal parts; the minimal parts in the denotation of collective nouns are atomic entities. The partitive quantifiers transform a group denoting entity into a sum denoting entity.

Abstract

Romanian collective nouns do not allow plural agreement on the verb, unlike in British English. But when a collective noun is used with a partitive quantifier (e.g. o parte din guvern “part of the government”), plural agreement is possible. We propose an analysis for partitive quantification, which can account for plural agreement with partitive collectives, as well as with partitive plural DPs (o parte dintre studenţi “part of the students”). Our analysis is based on Higginbotham’s (1994) analysis of mass and plural D-quantifiers. Quantification is construed in terms of amounts of minimal parts; the minimal parts in the denotation of collective nouns are atomic entities. The partitive quantifiers transform a group denoting entity into a sum denoting entity.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents vii
  3. Foreword and acknowledgements ix
  4. Editor’s introduction xi
  5. Theory and practice in Romance linguistics today 1
  6. Part I. Morphophonology
  7. On the origins of /ɨ/ in Romanian 17
  8. An acoustic investigation of nasal place neutralization in Spanish 33
  9. An acoustic study of rhotics in onset clusters in La Rioja 49
  10. Mid front vowel lowering before rhotics in Ibero-Romance 63
  11. Plural formation in Galician 79
  12. Part II. Syntax
  13. On bare subject relative clauses in Old French 101
  14. Directed motion in Medieval French 117
  15. An ergative analysis of French valency alternations 137
  16. Peninsular Spanish pre-nominal possessives in ellipsis contexts 155
  17. On the nature of nominal features 177
  18. On the nature of bare nouns in Afro-Bolivian Spanish 191
  19. Negative imperatives in Portuguese and other Romance languages 205
  20. Part III. Semantic interfaces
  21. Another look at Italian generic sentences 223
  22. The agreement of collective DPS in Romanian 239
  23. A multidominance account for conjoined questions in Romanian 257
  24. The Romanian verbal cluster and the theory of head movement 271
  25. New challenges in the area of semantic dependencies 287
  26. Polarity particles in English and Romanian 303
  27. Index 329
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.318.15cro

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents vii
  3. Foreword and acknowledgements ix
  4. Editor’s introduction xi
  5. Theory and practice in Romance linguistics today 1
  6. Part I. Morphophonology
  7. On the origins of /ɨ/ in Romanian 17
  8. An acoustic investigation of nasal place neutralization in Spanish 33
  9. An acoustic study of rhotics in onset clusters in La Rioja 49
  10. Mid front vowel lowering before rhotics in Ibero-Romance 63
  11. Plural formation in Galician 79
  12. Part II. Syntax
  13. On bare subject relative clauses in Old French 101
  14. Directed motion in Medieval French 117
  15. An ergative analysis of French valency alternations 137
  16. Peninsular Spanish pre-nominal possessives in ellipsis contexts 155
  17. On the nature of nominal features 177
  18. On the nature of bare nouns in Afro-Bolivian Spanish 191
  19. Negative imperatives in Portuguese and other Romance languages 205
  20. Part III. Semantic interfaces
  21. Another look at Italian generic sentences 223
  22. The agreement of collective DPS in Romanian 239
  23. A multidominance account for conjoined questions in Romanian 257
  24. The Romanian verbal cluster and the theory of head movement 271
  25. New challenges in the area of semantic dependencies 287
  26. Polarity particles in English and Romanian 303
  27. Index 329
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