112 research outputs found

    Telicity, specificity, and complements with a “partitive article” in French

    Full text link
    In this paper, we analyze sentences with a des-complement, that is, a complement introduced by a so-called “partitive article” in the plural, and focus on the impact of this complement on the (a)telicity of the eventuality. Although des-complements generally occur in atelic sentences, we discuss some telic situations in which they are possible. To explain the acceptability of such sentences, we examine various semantic properties of these complements which could play a role in the telic interpretation, such as the presence/absence of an implicit quantity expression in the complement, their type of reference (quantized vs. cumulative; individuated) and specificity. We propose that the des-complements found in telic situations involve a quantity that is known and that this “knowledge” can be formalized in terms of epistemic specificity, as defined in Von Heusinger (2002a, 2002b and subsequent developments)

    Disentangling Bare Nouns and Nominals Introduced by a Partitive Article

    Full text link
    This volume edited by Tabea Ihsane focuses on different aspects of the distribution, semantics, and internal structure of nominal constituents with a “partitive article” in its indefinite interpretation and of potentially corresponding bare nouns. It further deals with diachronic issues, such as grammaticalization and evolution in the use of “partitive articles”. The outcome is a snapshot of current research into “partitive articles” and the way they relate to bare nouns, in a cross-linguistic perspective and on new data: the research covers noteworthy data (fieldwork data and corpora) from Standard languages - like French and Italian, but also German - to dialectal and regional varieties, including endangered ones like Francoprovençal

    Disentangling Bare Nouns and Nominals Introduced by a Partitive Article

    Full text link
    This volume edited by Tabea Ihsane focuses on different aspects of the distribution, semantics, and internal structure of nominal constituents with a “partitive article” in its indefinite interpretation and of potentially corresponding bare nouns. It further deals with diachronic issues, such as grammaticalization and evolution in the use of “partitive articles”. The outcome is a snapshot of current research into “partitive articles” and the way they relate to bare nouns, in a cross-linguistic perspective and on new data: the research covers noteworthy data (fieldwork data and corpora) from Standard languages - like French and Italian, but also German - to dialectal and regional varieties, including endangered ones like Francoprovençal. Readership: All interested in the syntax-semantics interface of noun phrases with a “partitive article” and their corresponding bare nouns, as well as in diachronic issues, both in Romance and Germanic languages/dialects/varieties

    Disentangling Bare Nouns and Nominals Introduced by a Partitive Article

    Full text link
    This volume edited by Tabea Ihsane focuses on different aspects of the distribution, semantics, and internal structure of nominal constituents with a “partitive article” in its indefinite interpretation and of potentially corresponding bare nouns. It further deals with diachronic issues, such as grammaticalization and evolution in the use of “partitive articles”. The outcome is a snapshot of current research into “partitive articles” and the way they relate to bare nouns, in a cross-linguistic perspective and on new data: the research covers noteworthy data (fieldwork data and corpora) from Standard languages - like French and Italian, but also German - to dialectal and regional varieties, including endangered ones like Francoprovençal. Readership: All interested in the syntax-semantics interface of noun phrases with a “partitive article” and their corresponding bare nouns, as well as in diachronic issues, both in Romance and Germanic languages/dialects/varieties

    Introduction

    Full text link

    Introduction

    No full text
    The volume Disentangling Bare Nouns and Nominals Introduced by a Partitive Article, edited by Tabea Ihsane, focuses on different aspects of the distribution, semantics, and internal structure of nominal constituents with a “partitive article” in its indefinite interpretation and of potentially corresponding bare nouns. It further deals with diachronic issues, such as grammaticalization and evolution in the use of “partitive articles”. The outcome is a snapshot of current research into “partitive articles” and the way they relate to bare nouns, in a cross-linguistic perspective and on new data: the research covers noteworthy data (fieldwork data and corpora) from Standard languages - like French and Italian, but also German - to dialectal and regional varieties, including endangered ones like Francoprovençal

    Disentangling bare nouns and nominals introduced by a partitive article

    No full text
    The volume Disentangling Bare Nouns and Nominals Introduced by a Partitive Article, edited by Tabea Ihsane, focuses on different aspects of the distribution, semantics, and internal structure of nominal constituents with a “partitive article” in its indefinite interpretation and of potentially corresponding bare nouns. It further deals with diachronic issues, such as grammaticalization and evolution in the use of “partitive articles”. The outcome is a snapshot of current research into “partitive articles” and the way they relate to bare nouns, in a cross-linguistic perspective and on new data: the research covers noteworthy data (fieldwork data and corpora) from Standard languages - like French and Italian, but also German - to dialectal and regional varieties, including endangered ones like Francoprovençal

    Introduction: Shades of partitivity: Formal and areal properties

    Full text link
    At the heart of this special issue are partitive elements (i. e., partitive articles, partitive pronouns, and partitive case markers) which can express different “shades” of partitivity, namely true partitivity, pseudopartitivity, or indefiniteness, that is, the absence of a part-whole relation in the meaning, in contrast to (pseudo)partitivity. Since these partitive elements express (at least) two such notions, as they can be truly partitive but often are not, the questions around partitivity are complex, interrelated and challenging. This special issue, with a strong and wide crosslinguistic (typological) coverage, deals with two overarching topics: first, the geographical distribution of partitive elements and the identification of potential instances of language contact, and, second, sometimes in combination with the first topic, the formal description and explanation of different partitive constructions

    Preverbal subjects with a partitive article: A comparison between Aosta Valley Francoprovençal and French

    Full text link
    In this paper, we focus on two constructions that allow preverbal subjects headed by a so-called partitive article in French, that is, sentences with a stage-level predicate and generic emphatic constructions. The aim is to explain why their counterparts were generally not accepted by speakers of Francoprovençal, an endangered and understudied Gallo-Romance language, in a translation task carried out in fieldwork in the Aosta Valley in Italy (Ihsane 2018, Stark & Gerards 2020). To account for our results, we propose that preverbal subjects in the two languages have different statuses and develop the typology of languages postulated by Dobrovie-Sorin & Laca (2003): we argue that there are more than two types of languages when it comes to the status of preverbal subjects and that Francoprovençal differs not only from French (Ihsane 2018), but also from languages like Spanish: it generally has topical subjects like Spanish but also allows some subjects that represent new information to occur preverbally. In contrast to French, however, this option is restricted to nominals that reach a certain degree of referential givenness (Gundel 2003)

    RLLT19 : Selected papers from Going Romance Amsterdam

    No full text
    This volume contains a selection of the papers that were presented at the 35th Going Romance conference. Going Romance is one of the leading European annual conferences on the theoretical analysis of Romance languages. While since the creation of Going Romance in 1986 it used to be organized in turn by one of the six Romance departments of the Dutch universities, since 2009 it is organized in turn by a Dutch university or by another European university. Going Romance XXXV took place in Amsterdam on 1-3 December 2021. It was hosted jointly by the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU Amsterdam) and took place in a digital form, due to the pandemic. On the first day of the conference there were two workshops in parallel in the afternoon. The themes of the workshops were “Syntactic theory and language acquisition: The Romance perspective” and “Partitivity in Romance languages”. The acquisition workshop was organized by Marco Bril and Martine Coene. The partitivity workshop was organized by Tabea Ihsane and Petra Sleeman, two members of the European PARTE (“Partitivity in European Languages”) network, funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research NWO and the University Ca’ Foscari of Venice, the Károli Gáspár University in Budapest, the University of Pavia, and the University of Zurich. The invited speaker of the workshop on acquisition was Francesca Volpato. The invited speakers of the workshop on partitivity, PARTE members Elisabeth Stark and David Paul Gerards, presented a joint paper. The invited speakers of the main session were Ingo Feldhausen and Henriette de Swart. The main session contained a selection of the papers that were submitted for oral or poster presentation. The abstracts of all sessions were reviewed by three experts in Romance linguistics from all over the world. As usual, the areas of research varied from syntax and semantics to morphology and phonology, from a synchronic, diachronic and acquisitional perspective.</p
    corecore