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Definiteness marking and the structure of Danish pseudopartitives1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 June 2008

JORGE HANKAMER  and
LINE MIKKELSEN
JORGE HANKAMER*
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Cruz
LINE MIKKELSEN*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
*
Authors' addresses: Department of Linguistics, Stevenson College, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, U.S.A.hank@ucsc.edu
Department of Linguistics, 1203 Dwinelle Hall, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-2650, U.S.A.mikkelsen@berkeley.edu
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Abstract

The Danish pseudopartitive constructions differ in their possibilities of definiteness marking: the Indirect Partitive Construction (IPC) (D N1 P N2) permits N1 to bear the definite suffix, while the Direct Partitive Construction (DPC) (D N1 N2) does not; in addition, neither construction permits the prenominal definite article in the absence of a prenominal modifier. Drawing on previous work regarding the morphosyntax of definiteness marking in Danish, we use the distribution of definiteness marking as a probe to illuminate the structure of the pseudopartitive constructions. Our conclusion is that despite superficial similarities the two constructions are quite different in structure, the IPC having a lexical N head and a PP complement, and the DPC a functional n head with an NP complement, forming a single extended projection of N2. These assumptions allow us to account for a number of differences in the behavior of these constructions, shedding light on the nature of pseudopartitives as well as on the theory of extended projections.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , July 2008 , pp. 317 - 346
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

[1]

Part of this material was presented at UC Santa Cruz and at the 80th annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Albuquerque. We thank both audiences for their comments. We also thank Jane Grimshaw, Lars Heltoft, and Torodd Kinn for sharing their work on pseudopartitives with us, Henk van Riemsdijk for providing us with a copy of Vos (1999), and Bjarne Ørsnes for providing us with a copy of Daugaard (1994). Nick Fleisher and Maziar Toosarvandani read an earlier version of the paper and the current version has benefited greatly from their comments and from the comments of two anonymous JL reviewers. The work of the first author was supported by a grant from the Institute for Humanities Research at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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