Call for papers: Partitivity across domains, edited by Anna Bartra Kaufmann, Cristina Real Puigdollers and Xavier Villalba

The concept partitive usually describes nominal constructions that semantically express the relation between an individual or set of individuals and a part of it (e.g three of the students). Partitives have been of interest for both syntacticians and semanticists for many years in linguistic research since the seminal works by Jackendoff (1977) and Selkirk (1977). In recent years, partitives have received renewed attention as attested by the number of publications on this issue (see Zamparelli and Falco 2016, Ihsane and Stark 2020, Sleeman and Luraghi 2023). Several topics have been tackled, which include issues such as the typology of partitive constructions cross-linguistically and the relation between partitivity, quantification, measurement and proportion (Solt 2018, Bale 2022, Pasternak and Sauerland 2022).

The pervasiveness of partitive markers across domains and across languages raises many questions that try to solve the tension between considering partitivity as a primitive of the language faculty with several overt and covert outputs and disentangling the formal features of the many constructions that have been labeled as partitive in the literature. Therefore, the widespread presence of partitive markers across domains sparks the question about how to model partitivity in theoretical linguistics.

In order to get a deeper understanding on this issue we would like to ask for contributions dealing with partitive markers found in understudied and peripheric domains.  This edited volume aims to address these questions by focusing on the study of partitive markers in contexts that haven't received extensive attention.  We welcome papers dealing, but not restricted to, the following topics:

(1) Partitivity and exclamative constructions: How can genitive and degree markers in exclamative sentences be related to (pseudo) partitivity?

(2) Partitivity markers in dislocations/in the left periphery: Which properties are partitive markers related to in languages that exhibit partitive markers with dislocated phrases?

(3) Partivitiy markers and their interaction with negation: Why does negation trigger genitive case and partitive markers in some languages?

(4) The grammaticalization of partitive constructions and the loss of partitive markers: Which paths do the grammaticalization of partitive constructions and the loss of overt partitive markers follow?

(5) Pseudopartivity, number and counting: Is partitivity inherently related to number and counting?

(6) Partitivity, predication and expressive constructions: Are the same features involved in predicate inversion, partitivity and expressive expressions?

(7) Partitivity and ellipsis: How is the relationship between overt / covert partitive markers and ellipsis explained?

The submission deadline is 15th January 2025.