Measure Phrases and Semi‐Lexical Nouns

Abstract

Measure phrases (MPs, e.g., “two pounds”) appear in a wide variety of environments: nominal, adjectival, adpositional, and verbal structures. The goal of the chapter is to present an overview of the variety of constructions involving MPs as well as the different treatments that were proposed for these structures. Accordingly, the chapter reviews the internal structure of measure expressions as well as the function (predicate nominal, modifier or argument) and position of MPs inside the larger structures that contain them. The structures to be discussed include positive and differential MPs, which appear with adjectives as well as in compound, partitive, and pseudopartitive constructions with nominals. The chapter also addresses variation in the acceptability of MPs, both language‐internally and across languages, as well as the cross‐linguistically distinct realizations of structures that contain MPs. Other topics to be discussed are issues specific to spatial (“twenty miles”) and temporal measure expressions (“twenty minutes”) as well as classifier and container constructions.

The Status ofDein Romance Indefinites, Partitives and Pseudopartitives*

“…have pointed out the special properties of N1. Alexiadou and Stavrou (2020), following Stavrou (2003) and Csirmaz and Stavrou (2017), propose that pseudopartitives most characteristically consist of a semi‐lexical N that requires the presence of a lexical N2, which it measures or quantizes. The semi‐lexical head can consist of measure nouns, classifier‐like nouns, massifiers, group and cardinal nouns as in (59) (Alexiadou & Stavrou 2020:724, (23)).…”

“…Beyond this ambiguity of pseudopartitives, two main types of syntactic analysis are advanced in the literature: they are the so‐called mono‐projectional and the predicational analysis. The former, first proposed by Jackendoff (1977), Selkirk (1977), Löbel (1989) (see also Stavrou 2003, Csirmaz & Stavrou 2017, Alexiadou & Stavrou 2020), focuses on the existence of lexical categories ( water ) dominated by semi‐lexical categories ( bottle ), which are in turn dominated by a cardinal, an indefinite determiner or a quantifier ( a ). It advocates that the structure of pseudopartitives consists of one NP/DP projection, that contains a lexical N. The labels attributed to the relevant categories differ among the authors, but what is crucial is that the quantity‐designating element heads either an NP or a functional projection within the extended nominal projection.…”