European Partitives in Comparison

Overview & Synopsis

European Partitives in Comparison studies structures that express parts, amounts, and proportions typically in relation with wholes, with each other, or with measures. Examples of partitive are some friends, some water, some of my friends, some of this water, or a group of friends and a glass of water. The volume presents four studies on partitives across Europe, from Maltese and its Arabic relatives Gulf and Tunisian Arabic to the Mordvin languages Erzya and Moksha, from Czech to Hungarian Finnishlearners’ language. Erzsebet Panka investigates how Hungarian learners of Finnish navigate Finnish object cases, influenced by sentence polarity, aspect, and object quantification. Jack Rueter and Nadežda Kabaeva delve into the ablative case and quantification in Mordvin languages, using detailed morphological analyses and annotated corpora. Martin Janečka contrasts the usage of adnominal genitives in Czech journalistic texts across historical periods, highlighting shifts in partitive and possessive genitive usage. Iman Al Siyabi, Maris Camilleri, and Anne Tamm introduce the concept of fractional proportional partitives (FPPs), such as one in three, discussing grammaticalization and subject–verb agreement across various Arabic dialects and other world languages. This collection aims to offer a compelling journey into the syntactic and morphological analysis of partitives in languages and varieties in Europe.