PartitivesA workshop at SLE 43

Silvia LuraghiUniversity of Pavia

Tuomas HuumoUniversity of Tartu

What do we understand as partitive?

Partitive and pseudo partitive constructions, as in (1) and (2), are NOT the Workshop’s topic!!

•(1a) a cup of the coffee

•(1b) a bunch of your flowers

•(2a) a cup of coffee

•(2b) a bunch of flowers

Partitives at the Workshop

(1) On vypi-l cha-ya / cha-yu

He drink-PST tea-Sg.Gen tea-PART

“He drank (some) tea” (Russian)

(2) Amaiak ez du goxoki-rik jan

Amaia.erg not aux candy-part eat

“Amaia has not eaten any candy” (Basque)

(3) Sono arrivati degli ospiti americani

are arrived part.art guests American

“(Some) American guests have come” (Italian)

Frequently confused

Heine and Kuteva, World Lexicon of Grammaticalization, 2004: 32-33

(a) Gib mir ein bischen vom Kase!

give me a bit from:the cheese

Give me a bit of the cheese!’ (German)

(b) Elmeri loys- i mansiko- i- ta.

Elmer find-3sg.past strawberry-pl-partv

‘Elmer found strawberries.’ (Finnish)

The authors remark:

“Note, however, that “partitive” does not appear to be a

unified notion (Martin Haspelmath, personal communication).”

Aims of the workshop

• Bring together researchers working with partitives in individual languages or typologically.

• Open new cross-linguistic / typological views and research questions on partitives.

• Explicate semantic and grammatical functions of partitives in different languages.

Distribution and Morphological types of partitives

• ‘Dedicated’ partitive case: Baltic Finnic, Basque, Oceanian, Russian (to some extent)

• Cases that have some partitive-like functions: Hungarian (ablative); most Indo-European languages (genitive)

• Languages with partitive articles: French, Italian.

• Other types and/or other languages?

Grammatical functions of partitives

• Object-marking, subject-marking, adverbial-marking partitives.

• Partitives are typically not exclusive markers of any particular grammatical function (subject, object)

• They participate in complementary distribution with other cases marking NPs with this function.

• E.g.in Finnish, the object, the (existential) subject, the predicate nominal and some adverbials can all be marked with the partitive case (as an alternative to other cases such as the nominative and the accusative).

• In none of these functions, however, is the partitive case the only available marker.

Thus ‘partitive’ does NOT conform to current definitions of case:

“marking dependent nouns for the type of relationship they bear to their heads” (Blake2001: 1)

(Romance partitive articles are never considered case markers!)

Semantic correlates of partitives

• Moravcsik (1978): Typical semantic correlates of partitives include– Definiteness vs. indefiniteness;– The extent to which the object is involved in

the event;– The (in)completedness of the event;– Affirmation vs. negation.

• A general feature of partitives thus seems to be “indeterminacy” (in various manners).

– indefiniteness, – incompleteness, – unboundedness, – non-occurrence or non-existence (in

negation).

Research questions

• The distribution of partitives in different syntactic positions (objects, subjects, other rols) and across constructions;

• Partitives as determiners;• Types of verbs with which partitive

subjects (or objects) can occur;• The diachrony of partitives: their sources

and relations with other cases;

• Partitives as non-canonical grammatical markers;

• Grammaticalization of partitives;

• Discourse functions of partitives;

• Partitives of aspect and quantification; “nominal aspect”.

Presentations at the workshop

Partitives and negation, a cross-linguistic surveyMatti Miestamo - Helsinki Collegium for Advanced StudiesThe connection between partitive marking and negation has been attributed to different semantic and pragmatic factors, including aspect and referentiality/specificity. The typological evidence shows that aspect does not play a role, but referentiality and specificity are important factors.

Partitives stretching borders: How well do Finnish and Estonian partitive subjects serve as a criterion for the existential clause?Tuomas Huumo and Liina Lindström - University of TartuThis paper discusses the Finnish and Estonian partitive subject from a contrastive viewpoint. The emphasis is on the distribution of the partitive and the nominative in existential subjects, and on problems related with the use of the partitive as a defining criterion for the existential sentence, in particular in negated instances.

The Finnish Partitive revisited : a discourse-cognitive approach, in comparison with some other Finno-Ugric and Indo-European languages

M. M.Jocelyne Fernandez-Vest - C.N.R.S.-LACITO, Universités Paris 3 & Paris 4

The paper aims at classifying crosslinguistically the equivalents and/or the substitutes of the Finnish partitive. This is intended as a contribution to a typological theoretizing of “Partitive in natural discourse”.

Partitive semantics and semantic partitives in the Uralic languages

Anne Tamm – Università di Firenze and Research Institute of Linguistics, Budapest

This contribution examines on the example of Hungarian and more rare Uralic languages what the semantic map of the partitive meaning looks like, and how the partitive meaning is expressed morphologically.

How close are the Estonian partitive subjects to partitive objects?

Helena Metslang (University of Tartu - Tallinn University).

This talk takes a typological approach to differential subject and object marking in Estonian. It compares the phenomena and rules triggering partitive subject marking with the ones triggering partitive object marking (clause type, verb type, meaning of the situation, semantics of the referent of the NP, pragmatic factors) in different clause types. The talk discusses whether the nature of Estonian subject marking can be accounted for in terms of split-S system and will place the Estonian data in the typological context.

About the history of the Basque partitiveBorja Ariztimuño López - University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)This paper deals with the Basque partitive (-(r)ik) from a diachronic perspective. It focuses on the evolution of its different uses and the relationship between this affix and some other case-inflection and aims to elucidate the partitive’s proto-Basque source and its development.

The Basque partitive marker is interpreted existentiallyUrtzi Etxeberria, IKER/CNRS

The Basque partitive marker [-(r)ik] can only be attached to transitive objects and to intransitive subjects (de Rijk 1972, Ortiz de Urbina 1989) and requires licensing by some polarity element. Its meaning denotes an unspecificied quantity of whatever the NP denotes. When using the partitive, the speaker doesn’t care about whether the set denoted by the NP consists of one, five, ten, or a thousand elements. In other words, the speaker does not have a singularity or a plurality in mind. This, the partitive marker can be argued to be the negative form of the existential interpretation (in absolutive case) of the Basque definite article (D) [-a(k)].

Russian Partitive and the Verb Aspect.Katia Paykin (Université Lille 3).In most cases, the Russian partitive genitive competes with the accusative, but it can also appear on subjects of unaccusative verbs used in their impersonal form, thus competing with the nominative.We argue that the opposition between the partitive and the accusative or the nominative does not coincide with the opposition between definite and indefinite NPs, since the accusative and the nominative can give rise to both interpretations. The genitive NP emphasises quantity, while the accusative and the nominative NP denote a class.

Russian partitive over time: a corpus studyMichael Daniel, Nina Dobsrushina

This research will focus on residual second genitive (partitive) and its dynamics in the Russian texts. It is a micro-historical research in terms of Plungian (2002) and is based on considering second genitive distribution in the Russian National Corpus. The study considers the distribution of the three competing forms (accusative / genitive / second genitive) for various nouns and in different constructions (direct object vs. measure constructions vs. etc), tracing where the form is being preserved and where it is being lost.

Partitives and diminutives in Russian Evgenia Chernigovskaya - Moscow State University

The paper discusses differences in the use of partitive forms of diminutives vs. other nouns, after which the following questions will be addressed: 1) to perform a systematic check of the diminutive forms against the general “partitive” contexts and to compare the results and the level of acceptability by native speakers (questionnaire).2) To explain the fact that in case of the diminutive forms, the preference for partitive choices is more marked. The analysis to be proposed is based on the assumption that both partitives and diminutives have overlapping quantitative semantics, which is responsible for the resulting proximity .

Partitive Subjects and Objects in Indo-Iranian and Greek

Eystein Dahl - University of Bergen

This paper discusses the use of the (partitive) genitive as a subject and object marker in Vedic, Avestan and Homeric Greek and aims at a unified account of the semantic and pragmatic properties of partitive subjects and objects in Indo-Iranian and Greek.

The Ancient Greek partitive genitive in typological perspective.

Conti, Luz & Luraghi Silvia

(Universidad Autonoma de Madrid - Università di Pavia).As in other Indo-European, the genitive is used as a partitive in Ancient

Greek. Possible usages include direct object, second argument of intransitive verbs, subject, time and space adverbial, complement of adposition. In our paper we will adress the following issues:

• How does the Ancient Greek partitive genitive relate to the partitive genitive in other IE languages (types of usage; degrees of obligatoriness/grammaticalization);

• How does it compare with partitives across languages (restrictions on occurrence; semantic contribution);

• What reasons prevented its further extension.

The semantics of and relation between the partitive genitive subject constructions in ancient Indo-European languages and Baltic, Slavic.Ilja A. Seržant - University of BergenThe partitive genitive is an inherited category in Baltic (and Slavic) languages and it is not the result of the language contact with Balto-Finnic languages, as it is usually assumed. Alongside the core partitive semantics, the partitive genitive could be also employed as an indefiniteness marker.

The grammaticalization of the prepositional partitive in Romance

Béatrice Lamiroy- University of Leuven, Anne Carlier - University of Valenciennes

The paper focuses on stages of the grammaticalization from partitive construction to article in the Romance languages, and addresses the question whether the expression of the partitive under the form of a prepositional phrase rather than a case marker has an impact on the degree of grammaticalization.

Double government in Polish: semantic and pragmatic motivation for the use of genetivus partitivusElbieta Tabakowska, Jagiellonian University of Kraków

Polish does not use a separate case or a specialized case marking for partitives; within the rich case system of contemporary Polish, the “partitive meaning” is considered as an extension of the prototypical meaning of the Genitive (reference-point constructions).

In my presentation, I will consider a particular instance of the use of genetivus partitivus in contemporary Polish: following my earlier research (Tabakowska 2001a, b and in print), I will focus upon what Polish linguists call “double government”, i.e. the alteration between the

Accusative and the Genitive as the marker of direct object in constructions with transitive verbs. A corpus-illustrated analysis will be carried out to demonstrate that the opposition, which traditional Polish linguistics often classifies as a case of free variation, is in fact clearly motivated by semantic and pragmatic factors.