Linguistic Variation - Volume 24, Issue 2, 2024

In the last sixty years, starting with the method of introspection to judge the acceptability of linguistic data, research methods in linguistics have become more varied and more sophisticated. This also holds for studies on partitivity. In this paper various methods are presented that have recently been used in the literature to study variation in the linguistic expression and the use of partitive constructions and partitive elements in Romance, Germanic and some other languages, language varieties and dialects. It is argued that different types of research call for adapted methods. It is shown that the use of different methods may lead to different results, although this is not always the case. The overview presented in this paper reveals that in recent years much progress has been made in the study of variation in partitives.

This article examines methodologies for studying variation in partitives. It focuses on the challenges for languages with rich nominal morphology. Translation questionnaires have been widely and efficiently applied for discovering variation in Germanic and Romance partitives. We set up a mini questionnaire and provide its answers for Estonian to test the method. The current research situation of the Estonian morphological partitive case variation allows us to spot some inadequacies of this research instrument. We show the complexity of partitive variation across linguistic modules and discuss how the works presented in this volume as well as other related recent research may provide ancillary instruments to mitigate the shortcomings of a translation questionnaire. We close the discussion with some methodological alternatives open to morphologically complex languages in their typical research situations, applied to Beserman pseudo partitives and Ukrainian partitive genitives, and some synergies in recently applied methods.

The starting point of the present article is the usage of mass nouns with indefinite articles, known from modern Bavarian and neighbouring dialects. Our analysis is dedicated to the use of the indefinite article varying with bare nouns in a historical perspective, based on a cookbook handwritten in 1556 in the East Swabian variety of Augsburg, containing about 900 instances of mass nouns with and without articles. Like in modern Bavarian, the readings OBJECT and QUALITY can be distinguished. A comparison with the de-nominals in Old Spanish recipes shows that the indefinite articles appear in equivalent positions with mass nouns mostly denoting non-specific regular objects as instantiations of the kind. The discussion of quantifiers and measuring expressions shows a special syntactic and semantic behaviour of ain wenig ‘a little’. The final discussion leads to the assumption that the indefinite article does not formally express a partitive relation, but, at most, produces partitive effects.

This paper focuses on the variable use of partitive er in two types of constructions. First, er combined with cardinal numbers like drie ‘three’ and quantifiers like genoeg ‘enough’. Second, er combined with an elliptical noun referring to age and weight. Er should be present in the first case (Ik heb *(er) drie ‘I have three’) but absent in the second case (Hij is (*er) tachtig ‘He is eighty’), according to normative Dutch grammars.

The spontaneous spoken speech of 67 speakers born and raised in Heerlen, in the southeast of the Netherlands was analyzed, investigating the use of er also according to social distribution: language background, education/occupation and age.

The results show that er is used variably in the two types of constructions. It was found that younger speakers differ in some contexts from older speakers, suggesting that language change is going on, possibly under the influence of standard Dutch.

This article addresses a peculiar partitive construction in Icelandic – peculiar, in that it involves (case, number, gender) agreement between a quantificational element and the inner nominal, rather than dependency marking (by case or preposition) on the inner nominal. It is shown that this construction shares properties of both canonical partitives (definiteness marking) and pseudo-partitives (monophrasality), but actually qualifies as neither; it assumes an intermediate position. Based on this insight, we develop the idea that partitive constructions may be not simply a collection of “structures that fall under the umbrella term of “partitives”” (Falco and Zamparelli 2019: 1), but rather constitute a scale of partitivity. It is likewise conceded, however, that a proper map of partitivity may be more complex than a simple one dimensional hierarchy.

The article compares the distributional differences in the use of the partitive object cases in Estonian and Finnish via multifactorial modeling in contrastive research using the European Parliament parallel text corpus. Based on previous contrastive research on Finnic, we expected the principles of object case marking to be similar for Estonian and Finnish (confirmed), and the partitive objects to be more numerous in Estonian than in Finnish (not confirmed, as countable objects with scalar verbs proved less likely to be partitive in Estonian). We hypothesized that multifactorial modeling in contrastive research design could help identify the causes for variation and unfold subtle differences between related language systems. Since preferences related to grammatical voice and constituent order revealed subtle differences between the systems, this hypothesis was confirmed.