zero-marked true partitives

Michael Noonan noonan at CSD.UWM.EDU
Sun Jul 22 18:06:23 UTC 2007


A few years ago, Masha Koptjevskaja-Tamm made a useful distinction between
'pseudo-partitives' and 'true partitives'.  

PSEUDO-PARTITIVE
a kilo of tea

TRUE PARTITIVE
a kilo of that tea

Pseudo-partitives are units of measure, but true partitives are parts of
things.  Some languages, like English, deal with the two sorts of
partitives the same way; some languages have different means of expressing
the two relationships.

My question concerns languages that have zero-marked pseudo-partitives, as
in Chantyal:

dwita kilo cHa
two   kilo tea
'two kilos of tea'

Zero-marked pseudo-partitives involve simple juxtaposition of the measure
noun and the partitive NP.  In my limited sample, languages that have
zero-marked pseudo-partitives lack a true partitive, expressing the idea
clausally rather than within a noun phrase.  So, instead of a construction
like

	I want two kilos of that tea.

one would say something like:

	That tea [topic], I want two kilos.

Does anyone have any counterexamples; that is, does anyone know of a
language that has zero-marked pseudo-partitive that also has a true
partitive formed other than clausally?

Thanks.  Grammars seldom note partitives of either sort, and true
partitives almost never.

Mickey

Michael Noonan			
Professor of Linguistics
Dept. of English		
University of Wisconsin		
Milwaukee, WI  53201		
USA				

Office:	  414-229-4539
Fax:	  414-229-2643
Messages: 414-229-4511
Webpage:  http://www.uwm.edu/~noonan



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