Brasoveanu, Adrian 2008. Measure Noun Polysemy and Monotonicity: Evidence from Romanian Pseudopartitives,
to appear in the
Proceedings of the 38th Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society.
The two goals of this paper are: (i)
to argue that, syntactically, the measure noun is the head of the
extended projection in Romanian pseudopartitive constructions like (1)
– much like the leftmost noun is the head of true partitive
constructions like (2) (in Romanian, the preposition de appears only with pseudopartitives, while the preposition din/dintre appears only with true partitives); (ii) to propose a suitable semantics for pseudopartitives that accommodates this syntactic generalization.
(1) zece grame de
brînză
(de
capră)
(2)
zece grame din această brînză (de
capră)
ten grams of cheese (of
goat)
ten
grams of this cheese
(of goat)
ten grams of (goat) cheese
ten grams of this (goat) cheese
(3) #zece grame din
brînză
(de
capră)
(4)
#zece grame de această brînză (de
capră)
One of the two main contributions is arguing that measure nouns are polysemous, i.e. they have two distinct, but
closely related senses: (i) a
degree-based one, present in comparatives like Linus is two pounds heavier than Gabby or (arguably) nominal
compounds like two pound stone, and (ii)
an individual-based sense, present in pseudopartitives like ten grams of cheese or true partitives
like ten grams of this cheese and their
Romanian counterparts in (1) and (2) above. Secondly, the polysemy proposal enables us to derive the observation
in Schwarzschild (2006) ("The Role of Dimensions in the Syntax of Noun
Phrases", Syntax 9.1) that measure expressions are
monotonic in pseudopartitives (I use (non-)monotonic in
the sense of Schwarzschild 2006). Syntactically and
semantically, the measure expression is the head of the pseudopartitive while
the other nominal expression is the non-head, in contrast to Schwarzschild (2006), where the head/non-head
categorization is reversed.