Abstract
We consider the proposal that partitives always contain two positions for nouns which may be filled by silent material from the perspective of Japanese. We argue that it provides a novel account for cases of quantificational expressions that are frequently marked with genitive case in Japanese. Genitive case attached to nouns marks possession or partitivity, but on quantifiers it has been previously regarded as purely morphological. We show that genitive case on quantifiers can be analyzed as regular genitive case, and identify two distinct structures based on the two noun partitive structure. Specifically, we claim that the genitive suffix can be stranded by NP ellipsis, but when it can attach to a preceeding quantifier the structure remains grammatical. Our analysis therefore supports an analysis of partitives assuming two noun positions where ellipsis can target one or both of those two nouns.This article is part of Special Collection: Partitives
Highlights
The semantics of partitivity can be attributed to a preposition or case-morpheme at least in some languages: in English, the preposition of, and in German, genitive case or the preposition von
We argue in this paper that Q+no-structures like (2) should be analyzed as reverse partitives following Sauerland & Yatsushiro (2004)
Our main goal in this paper is to show that the prediction of the two noun analysis for Japanese partitives is borne out: Reverse partitive structures are possible in Japanese
Summary
We consider the proposal that partitives always contain two positions for nouns which may be filled by silent material from the perspective of Japanese. We argue that it provides a novel account for cases of quantificational expressions that are frequently marked with genitive case in Japanese. Genitive case attached to nouns marks possession or partitivity, but on quantifiers it has been previously regarded as purely morphological. We show that genitive case on quantifiers can be analyzed as regular genitive case, and identify two distinct structures based on the two noun partitive structure. Our analysis supports an analysis of partitives assuming two noun positions where ellipsis can target one or both of those two nouns
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