This chapter treats partitive constructions and the relation between the genitive and the partitive from a crosslinguistic perspective, showing that in Universal Grammar the partitive and the pseudopartitive are values of the genitive case. Partitive constructions fall into two categories, that is, partitives proper (1) and pseudopartitives (2):
The paper looks at size nouns of the type grămadă ‘heap / pile’ in Romanian and classifies them into two categories: size nouns with a comparative interpretation (Doetjes and Rooryck 2003) and size nouns with a quantifying interpretation (Brems 2007; 2010), the latter reading being sometimes contextually extended to a third type of interpretation, the negative evaluation interpretation (Brems 2010). The two major types of readings that size nouns may have are read off a head-complement syntactic structure, typical for pseudopartitive constructions, which size nouns+de+N constitute a subcategory of (Tănase-Dogaru 2017). The comparative interpretation arises as a reflex of the semi-lexicality of the size noun, while the quantifying interpretation is a reflex of the size noun having lost its original lexical meaning, and therefore serving a functional role.
The present paper investigates punctual vs. habitual readings of Romanian proper temporal names of the type luni ‘Monday’ vs. lunea ‘Monday.def’. These readings are associated with the absence vs. presence of the definite article (Franco and Lorusso 2022). The paper makes two major claims. Firstly, following Longobardi (1994, 2005), and Franco and Lorusso (2020), the paper claims that with bare, i.e., definiteless, proper time names, N-to-D movement triggers individual-like reference, which, in turn, explains why the event is interpreted as punctual. Secondly, the paper shows that the structure of proper temporal names is complex, in the sense that it contains the classifier zi ‘day’, thus paralleling the structure of complex descriptive proper names of the type ‘the planet Venus’ (see van Riemsdijk 1998, Cornilescu 2007 a.o.). This classifier is shown to be overt when there is no N-raising, and silent when N raises to D in the structure of proper temporal names.
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