<html>
<body>
Partitives<br>
<br>
<a name="OLE_LINK6"></a>Silvia Luraghi, Università di Pavia<br>
Tuomas Huumo, University of Tartu<br>
<br>
We plan to submit a workshop proposal to the 2010 Annual SLE (Societas
Lingustica Europaea) Meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania (2 - 5 September,
2010), and invite papers on partitives in crosslinguistic perspective.
Please send draft abstracts to both of us no later than November 8, 2009
(final abstracts must be submitted by January 1, 2010) at the following
addresses:<br>
<br>
<a name="OLE_LINK10"></a><a href="mailto:silvia.luraghi@unipv.it">
silvia.luraghi@unipv.it</a><a name="OLE_LINK10"></a><br>
<a href="mailto:tuomas.huumo@utu.fi">tuomas.huumo@utu.fi</a><br>
<br>
Workshop description<br>
<br>
Some languages, notably Baltic Finnic and Basque, have a partitive case,
which is usually said to indicate partial affectedness of patients (cf.
Blake 2001: 151). Such function is also attributed to other cases in
languages that do not have a separate partitive, as in the case of the
Hungarian partitive/ablative, and the partitive/genitive of various
Indo-European languages (a separate partitive, lexically restricted, also
exists in Russian). <br>
Depending on the language, the use of partitives may be more
or less restricted. In Basque, for example, the partitive occurs in
negative sentences and it can indicate either the object of transitive
verbs or the subject on intransitive verbs (in other words, it can
substitute the absolutive case in negative sentences). A connection
between negation and partitive(genitive) also occurs in the Slavic and
the Baltic Finnic languages. The alternation between the partitive and
other cases sometimes also has connections with aspect: this has been
argued for Baltic Finnic, Slavic (see e.g. Fischer 2004), and possibly
Sanskrit (Dahl 2009). In fact, partitivity is not only a possible feature
of patients: in Finnish existentials, for examples, even agentive
intransitive verbs such as <i>juosta</i> ‘run’, <i>opiskella</i> ‘study’,
etc., take partitive subjects. <br>
In some Indo-European languages, besides partitive objects
and partitive subjects (mostly with unaccusative verbs, cf. Conti 2009 on
Ancient Greek), partitive adverbials also exist, for example in time
expressions (such as <i>Nachts</i> ‘during the night’ in German). In
Ancient Greek, some locative occurrences of the partitive genitive are
attested (see Luraghi 2003, 2009): <br>
<i>è# halòs è# epì
gês
<br>
</i>or sea:gen or on land:gen <br>
“either at sea or on land” (Homer, <i>Od. </i>12.26-27). <br>
In one of the few existing cross-lingustic description of
partitives, Moravcsik (1978: 272) summarizes typical semantic correlates
of partitives as follows:<br>
a. the definitness-indefinitness of the noun phrase;<br>
b. the extent to which the object is involeved in the event;<br>
c. the completedness versus non-completedness of the event;<br>
d. whether the sentence is affirmative or negative.<br>
<a name="OLE_LINK8"></a> Moravcsik further remarks that
marking difference brought about by the partitive “does not correlate
with any difference in semantic case function”. Thus, the use of the
partitive seems to be at odds with the basic function of cases, that is
“marking dependent nouns for the type of relationship they bear to their
heads” (Blake 2001: 1): rather than to indicate a specific grammatical or
semantic relation that a NP bears to the verb, the partitive seems to
indicate indeterminacy (in various manners). <a name="OLE_LINK7"></a>In
fact, this has been noted by several authors. For example, Laka (1993:
158) suggestes that “what is referred to as ‘partitive case’ in Basque is
a polar determiner, much like English <i>any</i>”. In Finnish, the
functions of the partitive are also related to indeterminacy,
unboundedness and polarity, and it is noteworthy that the partitive is
not the sole marker of any grammatical function but participates in a
complementary distribution with other cases in all its main functions,
i.e. as marker of the object (PART~ACC), the existential subject
(PART~NOM) and the predicate nominal (PART~NOM). <br>
In this connection, one must mention the so-called partitive
article of some Romance varieties, which derives from the preposition
which has substituted the Latin genitive (Latin <i>de</i>). In French,
the partitive article is clearly a determiner and not a case marker, as
shown by its distribution:<br>
<i>L’enfant joue dans le jardin / un enfant joue dans le jardin<br>
</i><a name="OLE_LINK4"></a>the child plays in the garden / a child plays
in the garden<br>
<i>Les enfants jouent dans le jardin / <b>des</b> enfants jouent dans le
jardin<br>
</i>the childred play in the garden / some(=part. art.) childred play in
the garden<br>
The brief survey above shows that there are striking
similarities among partitives across languages, which are not limited to
the indication of partial affectedness. However, reaserch on partitives
is mostly limited to individual languages. In this workshop we would like
to bring together and compare data from different languages in which a
case (or an adposition, as in French) are classified as partitive. <br>
<br>
Possible topics for the workshop include, but are not limited to, the
following:<br>
(a) The distribution of partitives in different syntactic positions
(objects, subjects, other roles) and across constructions;<br>
(b) Partitives as determiners;<br>
(c) Types of verbs with which partitive subjects (or objects) can
occur;<br>
(d) The diachrony of partitives: what are the sources of partitive
markers? What is the diachronic relation between ablative, genitive, and
partitive? (cf. Heine and Kuteva 2002: 32-33, 241);<br>
(e) Do partitives always start out as possible substitutes for the object
case and then extend to subjects and possibly to other roles? (data from
French and other early Romance varieties would be in order regarding this
point);<br>
(f) Partitives as non-canonical grammatical markers: Finnish partitive
subjects and objects have been treated under the heading of
‘non-canonical marking’ (Sands and Campbell 2001). However, it is highly
questionable that the occurrence of partitive subjects and objects marked
by a partitive article, as in French, should also be considered under
this heading. Is the change from case marker (including adpositions) some
kind of grammaticalization process and at what stage should a morpheme
start to be considered a determiner, rather than a case marker? <br>
(g) Discourse functions of partitives: Since partitives indicate
indeterminacy, it might be expected that they are not topical elements in
discourse. For instance, Helasvuo (2001) has shown that the referents of
Finnish partitive subjects (unlike those of nominative subjects) are
typically not tracked in discourse. What is the discourse function of
partitives crosslinguistically? <br>
(h) Semantic roles and referential functions of partitives. <br>
(i) Partitives, aspect and quantification: The Baltic Finnic partitive
object is well-known for its function of indicating aspectual
unboundedness. Other BF partitives (existential, copulative) do not share
the aspectual function proper but often indicate an incremental theme (in
the sense of Dowty 1991), which gives rise to unbounded “nominal aspect”
(Huumo 2003, 2009). What are the aspectual and quantificational functions
of partitives crosslinguistically? <br>
<br>
References<br>
Blake, Barry 2001. <i>Case</i>. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.<br>
Conti, Luz 2008. Zum Genitiv bei impersonalen Konstruktionen im
Altgriechischen. Paper read at the <i>XIII. Fachtagung der
Indogermanischen Gesellschaft, Salzburg 22.9.-27.9.2008</i>.<br>
Dahl, Eystein 2009 Some semantic and pragmatic aspects of object
alternation in Early Vedic. In J. Barðdal and S. Chelliah (eds) <i>The
Role of Semantics and Pragmatics in the Development of Case.
Amsterdam</i>: John Benjamins<br>
Dowty, David 1991. Thematic proto-roles and argument selection.
<i>Language </i>67, 547–619.<br>
Fischer, Susann 2004. Partitive vs. Genitive in Russian and Polish: an
empirical study on case alternation in the object domain. In S. Fischer,
R. van de Vijver and R. Vogel (eds.), <i>Experimental Studies in
Linguistics</i>. I, LiP 21. 123-137.<br>
Heine, Bernd and Tania Kuteva 2002. <i>World Lexicon of
Grammaticalization</i>. Cambridge: CUP.<br>
Helasvuo, Marja-Liisa 2001. <i>Syntax in the Making: The emergence of
syntactic units in Finnish conversation</i>. Amsterdam: Benjamins.<br>
Huumo, Tuomas 2003. Incremental Existence: The World According to the
Finnish Existential Sentence. <i>Linguistics</i> 41/3: 461–493<br>
Huumo, Tuomas 2009. Fictive dynamicity, nominal aspect, and the Finnish
copulative construction. <i>Cognitive Linguistics</i> 20/1: 43–70.<br>
Laka, Itziar 1993. Unergatives that Assign Ergative, Unaccusatives that
Assign Accusative. <i>MITWPL </i>18: 149-172.<br>
Luraghi, Silvia 2003. <i>On the Meaning of Prepositions and Cases. A
Study of the Expression of Semantic Roles in Ancient Greek</i>.
Amsterdan: Benjamins.<br>
<a name="OLE_LINK2"></a>Luraghi, Silvia 2009. <a name="OLE_LINK1"></a>The
internal structure of adpositional phrases. In J. Helmbrecht Y.
Nishina, Y.M. Shin, S. Skopeteas, E. Verhoeven, eds., <i> Form and
Function in Language Research: Papers in honour of Christian
Lehmann</i><a name="OLE_LINK1"></a>. Berlin/ New York, Mouton de Gruyter,
231-254.<br>
Moravcsik, Edith 1978. On the case marking of objects. In Joseph
Greenberg <i>et al</i>. (eds.) <i>Universals of Human Language</i>, vol
IV. <i>Syntax.</i> Stanford University Press, 249-290.<br>
Sands, Kristina and Lyle Campbell 2001. Non-canonical subjects and
objects in Finnish. In A. Aikenvald, R. M. W. Dixon, and M. Onishi (eds.)
<i>Non-canonical Marking of Subjects and Objects</i>. Amsterdam:
Benjamins, 251-305.<br><br>
<x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
Silvia Luraghi<br>
Dipartimento di Linguistica Teorica e Applicata<br>
Università di Pavia<br>
Strada Nuova 65<br>
I-27100 Pavia<br>
telef.: +39-0382-984685<br>
fax: +39-0382-984487</body>
</html>