Volume 58, Issue 3 - Special Issue: Shades of partitivity: Formal and areal properties, Guest Editors: Tabea Ihsane and Elisabeth Stark

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.

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.

This paper addresses the use of partitive determiners in Piedmontese as a case in point for the interplay of language variation and change in Italo-Romance. Firstly, a brief diachronic account will be provided of the development of partitive determiners in Piedmontese, ranging from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; such an overview will rely upon the results of recent studies on this subject. Next, the behavior of partitive determiners in contemporary Piedmontese will be examined; we will draw primarily on some unpublished materials collected within the ALEPO research program (ALEPO stands for Atlante linguistico ed etnografico del Piemonte Occidentale , “Linguistic and Ethnographic Atlas of Western Piedmont”), which consist of both responses to a questionnaire survey and spontaneous speech data. The study will help to shed light on the similarities and differences not only between different varieties of Piedmontese, but also between such varieties and Italian. The main paradigmatic differences identified will be argued to relate to two different ways of categorizing the relationship between mass nouns and countable plurals, one in which quantification prevails over classification, and the other in which classification is foregrounded. This state of affairs will then be discussed against the backdrop of the sociolinguistic situation under scrutiny, paying special attention to the contact between Piedmontese and Italian (as well as with French up to the end of the nineteenth century) and to the “superposition” of both an official standard language (i. e., Italian) and a regional koine (based on the variety of Turin) over local varieties of Piedmontese.

This paper presents the results of a pilot study on the distribution of indefinite determiners in contexts with narrow scope interpretation in current informal Italian. It individuates the available forms and presents their diatopic distribution. The research is based on data collected through an online questionnaire designed to detect optionality. The results show that in narrow scope indefinite contexts, i. e., negative statements, both the zero determiner and the definite article are widespread throughout the country. The partitive determiner is only found in episodic sentences and is limited to restricted geographic areas. In all contexts and areas, a large degree of optionality is found. In some context and area, however, it is possible to identify one form more prominent than the others. This can be related to the context, which may favour some specialized meaning of one specific form, e. g., saliency and small quantity, or to diatopic variation due to language contact with the dialect, as shown by comparing present-day informal Italian with the dialectal data reported in AIS and analysed in (Cardinaletti and Giusti. 2018. Indefinite determiners: Variation and optionality in Italo-Romance. In Diego Pescarini & Roberta D’Alessandro (eds.), Advances in Italian dialectology: Sketches of Italo-Romance grammars , 135–161. Amsterdam: Brill).

In this paper we revisit the main properties of the partitive (PC) and the pseudopartitive construction (PPC) in Greek placing our focus on the distribution of the preposition apo ‘of/from’, which introduces the partitive complement in the PC but is absent from the PPC. We propose two distinct analyses for the two constructions, which predict the particular distribution of apo as a meaningful preposition, according to our hypothesis. We further discuss the crosslinguistic implications of our analysis.

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.

This paper focusses on the so-called partitive pronoun in French and Dutch, and the corresponding data in German, a language which is assumed not to have partitive pronouns in its standard, in contrast to certain dialectal varieties. Taking the diverse uses of the French partitive pronoun en as a starting point, we investigate the corresponding constructions in Dutch and German. The ultimate aim of the paper is to develop an analysis accounting for the similarities and differences between these languages in relation to the presence/absence of the partitive pronoun. To reach our objectives, we rely on data collected in a Grammaticality Judgment Test taken by native speakers of French, Dutch and German. We put together theory and experimental data in a crosslinguistic perspective investigating three languages that differ in their uses of partitive elements and formalize the results in a model in which the partitive pronoun can replace different portions of the nominal structure.

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 preposition de and 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 by de / di and a partitive clitic (Sardinian nde , French en , Italian ne , Catalan en / 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.

Molise Slavic is a south Slavic micro-language, spoken in three municipalities in the Italian region of Molise. It has been in a situation of total language contact with Romance varieties for about 500 years, with strong foreign influence on all linguistic levels. This paper is intended as a contribution to two combined fields of linguistics: contact linguistics and the expression of partitivity in Slavic in different settings. The paper opens with a short description of the position of the (morphological) partitive case in Russian, followed by a comparison of the role of case in expressing partitive objects in Russian, Croatian and Molise Slavic. The subsequent section will deal with other means of rendering pure and ablativic partitivity in Italian as the dominant model language and in the Molise Slavic replica, in particular with respect to the similarities and differences in existential constructions. Special attention will be paid to the Italian partitive particle ne and its formal and functional equivalents in Molise Slavic, including the particle na/ne , partitive personal pronouns, quantifiers, the genitive and the role of intonation and word order. Finally we will test various hypotheses about the origin of the particle na/ne , whose formal variation in one of the Molise Slavic dialects causes serious problems for both loanword integration and semantic calquing.

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.

I present an account of the interplay between quantifiers and the partitive–accusative case alternation in Finnish object marking, with special reference to the aspectual and quantificational semantics of the clause. The case alternation expresses two oppositions (in affirmative clauses): (a) bounded (accusative) vs. unbounded (partitive) quantity, (b) culminating (accusative) vs. non-culminating (partitive) aspect. The quantifiers analyzed are of two main types: (i) mass quantifiers (e. g., paljon ‘a lot of’, vähän ‘(a) little’), which quantify a mass expressed by a mass noun or a plural form, (ii) number quantifiers (e. g., moni ‘many’, usea ‘a number of’), which quantify a multiplicity of discrete entities expressed by a count noun in the singular or plural. Finnish mass quantifiers only quantify nominals in the partitive, while number quantifiers agree with the quantified nominal in number and case and are used throughout the case paradigm. With a mass quantifier, the partitive form of the quantified nominal expresses unbounded quantity, which the quantifier then renders bounded (quantized). This is why object phrases with mass quantifiers behave like accusative objects: they express a bounded quantity together with culminating aspect. Number quantifiers quantify both accusative and partitive objects, in the singular and plural. Such objects are able to express aspect and quantity at two levels: (i) that of the individual component events which concern one entity each; (ii) that of the higher-order event which concerns the whole quantity expressed. I argue that the case marking of the object relates primarily to level (i), while the meaning of the number quantifier relates to level (ii). This is why a number quantifier typically renders the quantity bounded and the aspect culminating at level (ii), even when the partitive case expresses unboundedness or lack of culmination at level (i).