Crosslinguistic variation in partitives

Sleeman, Petra; Luraghi, Silvia

doi:10.1075/lv.21020.lur

Cited by 4 publications

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“…(2) a bunch of flowers The linguistic expression of partitive constructions and elements presents considerable variation among languages, language varieties and dialects (Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2001;Cardinaletti & Giusti 2018;Sleeman & Luraghi 2023) and a partitive construction or partitive element may even be expressed in different ways within the same language (Falco & Zamparelli 2019), but there may also be interspeaker variation in their use or variation depending on the linguistic context. Sleeman (2022a) illustrates several of these types of variation for the Dutch weak partitive pronoun er, which is also called a quantitative pronoun in the literature.…”

Section: Partitives and Variationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Methods for studying variation in partitives

Sleeman

2024

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In the last sixty years, starting with the method of introspection to judge the acceptability of linguistic data, research methods in linguistics have become more varied and more sophisticated. This also holds for studies on partitivity. In this paper various methods are presented that have recently been used in the literature to study variation in the linguistic expression and the use of partitive constructions and partitive elements in Romance, Germanic and some other languages, language varieties and dialects. It is argued that different types of research call for adapted methods. It is shown that the use of different methods may lead to different results, although this is not always the case. The overview presented in this paper reveals that in recent years much progress has been made in the study of variation in partitives.

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Section: Partitives and Variationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Methods for studying variation in partitives

Sleeman

2024

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“…11 There is abundant literature on the relation between case morphology and (in)definiteness. For recent discussion we refer the reader to Stark and Ihsane (2020), Sleeman and Giusti (2021) and Sleeman and Luraghi (2022). Italian patterns with French and Catalan in having a special clitic, ne/en, for indefinite nominals that alternates with accusative clitics or nominative pro that resume definite and specific nominals.…”

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Variation in the Occurrence and Interpretation of Articles in Malagasy: A Comparison with Italian

2022

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In languages that have a definite article but no indefinite article, the definite article typically maps to definites, and the bare noun maps to indefinites. We investigate this mapping in Malagasy, which imposes an additional restriction: bare nouns cannot be subjects. We ask whether the subject can be interpreted as indefinite, given the obligatory nature of the article. We also look at DPs in other positions (direct object, clefted subjects) to determine whether the mapping between form and meaning is one-to-one. To answer these questions, we administered an on-line questionnaire that presented participants with the choice of the article or the bare noun in the different positions (subject, object, cleft) in contexts that favoured an indefinite/novel interpretation. As predicted, the article was obligatory in subject position, but disfavoured in the object and cleft position. These results confirm current descriptions in the literature. We compare these results with a similar case of definite article in indefinite nominals found in Italian and propose that the article does not carry definiteness features (at least in these cases) but overtly marks (abstract) Case assignment on subjects, while it can remain silent on objects.

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Ivaska,

Tamm

2024

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The article compares the distributional differences in the use of the partitive object cases in Estonian and Finnish via multifactorial modeling in contrastive research using the European Parliament parallel text corpus. Based on previous contrastive research on Finnic, we expected the principles of object case marking to be similar for Estonian and Finnish (confirmed), and the partitive objects to be more numerous in Estonian than in Finnish (not confirmed, as countable objects with scalar verbs proved less likely to be partitive in Estonian). We hypothesized that multifactorial modeling in contrastive research design could help identify the causes for variation and unfold subtle differences between related language systems. Since preferences related to grammatical voice and constituent order revealed subtle differences between the systems, this hypothesis was confirmed.

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Crosslinguistic variation in partitives

Cited by 4 publications

References 42 publications

Methods for studying variation in partitives

Methods for studying variation in partitives

Variation in the Occurrence and Interpretation of Articles in Malagasy: A Comparison with Italian

Same yet different

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