Two nouns in partitives: evidence from Japanese

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

Keywords

• determiner
• ellipsis
• proportions
• quantification
• measurement
• monotonicity