Part and parcel of eliding partitives

Abstract

This paper argues that bare determiners as in the sentence ‘Many sat down.’ should be analyzed as involving the elision of a partitive phrase, as opposed to a noun phrase as is commonly assumed (Lobeck 1991, 1995; Bernstein 1993; Panagiotidis 2003; Alexiadou and Gengel 2011; Corver and van Koppen 2009, 2011). This analysis is supported by (i) the anaphoric interpretation of the bare determiners in context; (ii) the syntax of bare determiners; and (iii) deep event anaphora. Further, the adoption of partitive ellipsis comes with the suggestion that partitive DPs do not involve null intermediary noun phrases (cf. Jackendoff 1977, Sauerland and Yatsushiro 2004, and Ionin et al 2006), but rather that determiners can take partitive phrases as internal arguments (Matthewson 2001). The existence of such a phenomenon also militates in favor of a meaning isomorphy approach to the licensing of ellipsis (Merchant 2001), rather than structural isomorphy (Fiengo and May 1994).

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