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Although the interest in the concept of partitivity has
continuously increased in the last decades and has given rise to
considerable advances in research, the fine-grained
morpho-syntactic and semantic variation displayed by partitive
elements across European languages is far from being
well-described, let alone well-understood. There are two main
obstacles to this: on the one hand, theoretical linguistics and
typological linguistics are fragmented in different methodological
approaches that hinder the full sharing of cross-theoretic
advances; on the other hand, partitive elements have been analyzed
in restricted linguistic environments, which would benefit from a
broader perspective. The aim of the PARTE project, from which this
volume stems, is precisely to bring together linguists of different
theoretical approaches using different methodologies to address
this notion in its many facets. This volume focuses on Partitive
Determiners, Partitive Pronouns and Partitive Case in European
languages, their emergence and spread in diachrony, their
acquisition by L2 speakers, and their syntax and interpretation.
The volume is the first to provide such an encompassing insight
into the notion of partitivity.
Ever since Chomsky's Barriers, functional heads have been the
privileged object of research in generative linguistics. But over
the last two decades, two rival approaches have developed. The
cartographic project, as represented by the collections in this
Oxford series, considers evidence for a functional head in one
language as evidence for it in universal grammar. On the other
hand, minimalist accounts tend to consider structural economy as
literally involving as few heads as possible. In the present
volume, some of the most influential linguists who have
participated in this long-lasting debate offer their recent work in
short, self contained case studies. The contributions cover all the
main layers of recently studied syntactic structure, including such
major areas of empirical research such as grammaticalization and
language change, standard and non-standard varieties, interface
issues, and morphosyntax. Functional Heads attempts to map aspects
of syntactic structure following the cartographic approach, and in
doing so demonstrate that the differences between the cartographic
approach and the minimalist approach are more apparent than
substantial.
This volume offers a new perspective on the syntax of nominal
expressions in various European languages, arguing that articles do
not directly and biunivocally realise semantic definiteness. The
first two chapters provide an accessible introduction to recent
developments in generative syntax, namely the cartographic and
minimalist approaches, by focusing on the "imperfect" parallels
between clauses and nominal expressions. The third chapter shows
that feature sharing is not the result of a unique syntactic
process, but, rather, the consequence of Merge, which creates
syntactic structure instantiating two types of relation: Selection
and Modification. It argues for three different ways of
transferring features: Agreement allows for an argument (an
independent phase, selected by a head) to re-enter the computation
as part of the predicate of the new phase. It targets Person
features and is not involved in the feature sharing triggered by
modification. Concord copies the features of N (notably gender,
number and case, where this is present). It is the result of
Modification and can coexist with Agreement. Finally, Projection is
triggered by multiple internal mergers of the head, bundled with
all its interpretable and uninterpretable features, which may be
realized in different segments. The fourth chapter focuses on the
nature of determiners such as articles, demonstratives,
quantifiers, possessive adjectives and pronouns, personal pronouns
and proper names, and shows that only articles have the properties
to be attributed to "functional heads" because they are a segment
of a scattered nominal head. The rest of the volume is devoted to
the analysis of syntactic phenomena, such as double definiteness,
expletive articles, and weak and strong adjectival inflection, by
means of the proposal that (scattered) nominal or adjectival heads
concord with their modifiers. This approach reinterprets head
movement in a fashion that makes it compatible with minimalist
requirements, provides an explanation for the apparent optionality
of head movement, eliminates the typology of head movements by
adjunction or substitution, and gives an original answer to the
doubts raised about the legitimacy of the very notion of
"functional category".
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