Partitive Cases and Related Categories

Silvia Luraghi, Tuomas Huumo, Silvia Luraghi, Tuomas Huumo

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9783110344042
• eBook ISBN: 9783110394573
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Argument-marking, morphological partitives have been the topic of language specific studies, while no cross-linguistic or typological analyses have been conducted. Since individual partitives of different languages have been studied, there exists a basis for a more cross-linguistic approach. The purpose of this book is to fill the gap and to bring together research on partitives in different languages.

II Uralic languages

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Anne Tamm

3 The Partitive Concept versus Linguistic Partitives: From Abstract Concepts to Evidentiality in the Uralic Languages¹⁹

Finnic and Sámi (Uralic, Finno-Ugric) languages have a morphological case that is referred to as the partitive. The meaning of the dedicated partitive case, however, diverges from the generally assumed partitive concept of part-whole relationships. Instead, the meaning of the partitives is either bleached, or it has developed to express other categories, such as aspect. Since the partitive also combines with non-finites, further developments have resulted in grammatical markers that are based on the partitive but belong to epistemic modality and evidentiality. As for the part-whole concepts, the Uralic languages tend to express them rather by juxtaposed bare nouns, elatives, or ablatives than by morphological partitives. The article places this mismatch between form and meaning in a wider context of using abstract concepts for comparing grammatical categories across languages. Examining the grammaticalization of TAM categories in Estonian (Finnic) and the partitives among the rich system of Uralic separatives, the analysis employs two terms: the Partitive Concept – a heuristic tool and a basic concept used for comparison – and Linguistic Partitives, dedicated morphological partitive cases and their language-specific further developments. Linguistic Partitives are described via two (or more) concepts. Firstly, they are described via the concepts that they express, such as aspect or evidentiality. Secondly, they are also described in terms of the Partitive Concept. This multiple linking to concepts, the Partitive Concept and for instance TAM concepts, is intended to guarantee that the description of language-specific categories, such as Estonian aspect or evidentiality, reflects the aspectual and evidential nature of these categories as well as the overarching system of partitivity in the Finnic grammatical system. In addition, the Partitive Concept is constructed to serve as a suitable basis for further psycholinguistic testing with the goal of finding out if the abstract concept corresponds to a cognitively motivated linguistic category.

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Keywords: source, separative, concepts, grammatical categories, cross-linguistic comparison, Uralic.

1 Introduction

Partitive is among the most theory-dependent terms for a case in modern linguistics. This paper targets some of the confusing issues concerning the partitives from the Uralic languages. The main aim is to reduce the uninformed crosstalk between linguists of different traditions and help them see where their coverage of the term “partitive” converges or diverges. What is the uniform conceptual toolkit to tackle the examples discussed under the term “partitive” in (1)?

Scholars referring to the category expressed by the Russian -u on čaj-u in čaška čaj-u ‘a cup of tea’ in (1a) may understand why the category expressed by the Hungarian elative -ből in the example gyerekeim-ből a legfiatalabb ‘the youngest of my children’ (1b) should be referred to as “partitive”, but they will find it problematic to extend the category to the Finnish partitive -a in the complement of ilman rahaa ‘without money’ (1c). Scholars concentrating on the Finnic partitive forms, for instance, the partitives occurring as part of the object (1d) and predicate (1e) in the Estonian, ‘Mary was eating an apple’ and ‘Allegedly/ reportedly, Mary will come home’ find it unintuitive to refer to genitives and elatives as “the partitive”. The main puzzle is thus how to compare these and many other partitives in relation to each other. The main solutions proposed in this paper follow in (i).

• (i) A distinction between “Linguistic Partitives” and “Partitive Concepts” in describing the partitive phenomena in Uralic is useful for better understanding of the partitive phenomena. Distinguishing the two helps to compare the mismatches between the partitive form and the part-whole meaning across the individual languages.
  • – The Partitive Concept is an abstract concept that serves for comparing the semantics of grammatical forms to the “part-of-N” (1b) and “amount-of-N” (1a) concepts.
    • – The Partitive Concept comprises two metonymically related subconcepts: the partitive (N-of-the N, 1b) and the pseudopartitive (N-of-N, 1a).
• – A Linguistic Partitive is a grammatical form that is conceptually related to the meaning of the Partitive Concept. The partitive cases have developed their specific semantics and pragmatics in each Uralic language where the case appears.
  • – The Linguistic Partitive is divided into functional (e.g., aspectual, 1d, evidential, 1e) and structural categories (e.g., complement case, default case 1c), depending on the semantics of the partitive in the structure of the language at hand.

The term “partitive” is most frequently applied to a type of Indo-European genitive (Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2001: 525). The term typically covers phenomena that are not morphological partitives, but still similar to (1a), the Russian -u on čaj-u in čaška čaj-u ‘a cup of tea’ or to the Hungarian elative -ből in gyerekeim-ből a legfiatalabb ‘the youngest of my children’. Other aspects of the forms referred to as the partitive have enjoyed considerable attention in theoretical linguistic literature due to the special thematic relationship that the partitive encodes between the predicate and the object as in (1d) (Krifka 1992). Hoeksema (1996) contains several formal and generative papers on the partitive. De Hoop (1996) gives an influential account in terms of quantifiers, and de Hoop (1998) offers an extensive overview of the theoretical approaches to the phenomenon and a thorough bibliography. At the interface between cognition and language, Jackendoff (1991) relates cognition and theoretical linguistics with the concept of partitivity and parts, and interpretational peculiarities of some partitive phenomena via discourse and pragmatics. In psycholinguistics, Reed (1991) discusses several constraints of the partitive constructions, arguing that these constraints stem from discourse requirements.

Some of these influential typological, theoretical and cognitive accounts mention a lesser known, but nevertheless theoretically and typologically intriguing phenomenon: a dedicated partitive case. The Uralic languages, more specifically, the Finnic and Sámi languages are a whole group of related languages where there is a morphological partitive. This case marks objects, subjects, pre-dicatives, other complements, and even measure adjuncts. It combines with various non-finites (nominalizations) that vary in their degree of finiteness. The combinations of nonfinites and the partitive case formant are either transparent or opaque, and are combined productively or have completely grammaticalized as intersubjective markers. Especially several recently analyzed Estonian partitive case phenomena are an interesting object of study between form, meaning, cognition, and communication in general. Modern Estonian has a wide range of furher developments of the partitive, covering distinct functional categories such as aspect or evidentiality. The partitive evidential is an intersubjective marker the understanding of which requires a Theory of Mind. The partitive has also developed a wide variety of desemanticized uses and is a structural case because it behaves as a formal, semantically opaque complement case.

There are many questions this contribution wishes to address. What is the relationship between the idea we have about partitivity and the various occurrences of a dedicated partitive form? How are these occurrences related? How does the partitive distinguish itself from other similar cases, such as the accusative, or the source cases? Is there a uniform partitive concept that can be taken as a reference point for comparisons? How should we map the partitive meanings to the partitive forms across languages? What is the function of the partitive in communication? A wider perspective on partitive and partitive-like concepts in the Uralic languages provides valuable material for further studies into the relationship between language, communication, and the cognition of concepts. Up until now, the description has been fragmented for the specific purposes of particular studies. This article wishes to give a representative overview of the properties of the morphological partitives and related cases in the Uralic languages.

The partitive is by now a well-studied grammat...

Table of contents

• Empirical Approaches to Language Typology
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• References
• I Typological aspects
• II Uralic languages
• III Basque
• IV Slavic languages
• V Historical perspectives on Indo-European languages
• VI Oceanic languages
• Subject index
• Author index