zero-marked true partitives

[Nigel Vincent]

How about Danish:
fem kilo kartofler 'five kilos of potatoes'
but
fem kilo af de kartofler 'five kilos of those potatoes'
(Examples courtesy of my native speaking wife and daughter but see 
Robin Allan,
Philip Holmes & Tom Lundskaer-Nielsen 'Danish. A Comprehensive Grammar',
London, Routledge, 1995, para 732 (e) for recognition of the different 
types of
partitive.)
In fact in my experience, partitives in pedagogically oriented reference
grammars aimed at an English speaking readership such as the above get quite a
lot of space - see also for example Martin Maiden & Cecilia Robustelli 'A
reference grammar of modern Italian', London, Edward Arnold, 2000, pp. 76-9. I
suspect this is because of the fairly subtle differences in constructions with
and without the use of the preposition corresponding to 'of' in what is a
pretty common type of expression and one where Anglophone learners tend 
to make
mistakes. In other words, the tendency Mickey notes is probably characteristic
of grammars of a certain kind and not by any means of all grammars.
Nigel

Quoting Michael Noonan <noonan at csd.uwm.edu>:

> 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
>



-- 
Professor Nigel Vincent, FBA
Associate Vice-President for Graduate Education


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