The phrase 2 liters of oil is a pseudopartitive.It includes a measure phrase, 2 liters, and a substantive indicating what kind of substance is measured.I can use 2 liters of oil to talk about oil whose volume is 2 liters.Suppose I wanted instead to talk about oil whose temperature was 90 degrees.I should be able to say * 90 degrees of oil, but I can't.Instead, I have to say 90-degree oil.The absence of of indicates that this is not a pseudopartitive.The absence of number marking on degree suggests that it is a nominal compound.What is it about 90 degrees that prevents its use in pseudopartitives but allows it compounds?too much gold is also a pseudopartitive, which, fo r reasons not relevant here, needs no of Parsons(1970) observed that expressions like these are ambiguous about how the gold is being measured.It could be too much gold by weight or too much by volume.But if it can mean gold which is too heavy or gold whose volume is excessive, why can't it mean gold which is too dark?"You put too much gold in the ring," I would say to the jeweler, to mean that the gold in the ring is darker than I wanted.But I can't use too much gold in that way, and it isn't because much is unable to quantify over degrees of darkness, fo r that is just what it seems to do when I say "the gold is much darker than I had expected."Inches and fe et are appropriate units fo r measurements taken in various dimensions.Nevertheless, while I can use a fo ot of cable to speak of length, if I'm concerned with the diameter of the cable, why must I say quarter inch cable, again employing a compound, which is of-less and devoid of number marking, and where the indefinite article is omitted before quarter?And if 2 fe et of cable concerns the length of the cable, how is it that 2 fe et of snow tells us about the depth of the snow and nothing about the length?Terminological Note.'pseudopartitive' is a descriptive syntactic label, while 'measure phrase' and 'substantive' are semantic labels.I use 'measure phrase' to include not only noun phrases whose head is a term of measure such as gallon or ounce, but also adjectival phrases such as much, too much and so many as well as expressions such as a lot or a little or a truckload.'substantive' is used to cover noun phrases like those fo llowing of in a pseudopartitive as well as the head nouns of compounds.Although both compounds and pseudopartitives do not have to be fo rmed with measure phrases, until further notice, I restrict consideration to those that are.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 186 citations exist upstream.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.