Pseudopartitive constructions are not a subtype of nominal juxtaposition in Beserman

Abstract

Juxtaposition as a machinery of building noun phrases is well-known to be widespread in Uralic languages: the modifier is left-adjoined to the head and does not bear any morphological marker of syntactic dependency. This strategy is used to attach adjectives, cardinals and modifying nominals to nouns (like in Beserman ǯ́aǯ́eg siĺ ‘goose meat’), and to build constructions with measure nouns (like Beserman odig kə̑də̑ gibi ‘one basket of mushrooms’, lit. one basket mushroom). However, there remains a question whether all these constructions share the same syntactic structure. We consider pseudopartitive constructions with measure nouns in comparison with NPs containing non-marked modifying nominals and NPs with adjectives, showing that they do not share the same syntactic structure. Constructions with unmarked modifying nominals show properties of compounding, while pseudopartitives arguably have a measure phrase (a cardinal with a measure noun) and a noun phrase (the quantified nominal), which is the head of the pseudopartitive construction. The syntactic properties we analyze include constituent properties, branching, pronominalization, fragment questions, linear ordering restrictions, particular properties of head ellipsis, and information structure effects.