Partitives and partitivity

Abstract

The paper offers a broad overview of several structures that fall under the umbrella term of “partitives”. It surveys previous analyses and proposes a treatment based on two null operators, PART% and PARTpro, with different syntactic and semantic properties. The approach is argued to outperform previous theories in its ability to cover conjunctions, mass cases and contrastive differences across Italian and English. Crowd-sourced grammaticality judgments and corpus searches are used to supplement informal judgments and try to shed light on a complex set of facts.