User:Rachaelhannay/sandbox

In linguistics, the partitive is a word, phrase, or case that indicates partialness. Partitives can be divided into two classes: full or headed partitives, and bare or determinerless partitives. These two classes of partitives can be distinguished based on their distributional properties (semantic criteria), and their internal structures (syntactic criteria). In the English sentence "I'll have some coffee", "some" is a partitive determiner, because it makes the noun phrase some coffee refer to a subset of all coffee. “Some” is an example of bare or determinerless partitives. Similarly, the preposition "of" often serves as a partitive, as in "many of my friends", "the youngest of the children", "a glass of the red wine", "some of the milk", and "some of the people". “Of” is an example of a full or headed partitive.

In English, the use of the partitive "some" is optional: "I'll have some coffee" has very nearly the same meaning as "I'll have coffee". In most Romance languages, however, the partitive is mandatory. For example, in French, "I want to drink some coffee" is expressed as "Je veux boire du café"; here "du" (an obligatory contraction of "de le" (of the)) is the partitive and is the equivalent of the optional English "some". The feminine form is "de la", and the plural form is "des" (an obligatory contraction of de les "of the (plural)"). Some languages, for example Estonian and Finnish, have a special partitive case. In Latin, German and Russian, the partitive is expressed by the genitive case. For a limited number of words in Russian, though, a partitive expression has its own separate formulation; this group is generally regarded as a special type of the genitive (also called the "second genitive") case. Its use is quite common.

Some linguists define true partitives as having only one noun followed by a preposition. In English the prepositional element is “of”. Furthermore, some linguists will also classify partitives that refer to a specific amount of something to be referred to as pseudo-partitives. For example:

“A box of those chocolates” would be considered a partitive, while: “A box of chocolates” would be considered a pseudo-partitive.

Other linguists speculate that "of" is not the head of a prepositional phrase, and represents a case marker when it is used in the partitive. Regardless, either definition can be represented abstractly as:

Determiner+of+Determiner+Noun

The Partitive Constraint requires the noun to be presented as an obligatorily definite determiner phrase by either having a demonstrative, definite article, or possessive specifier. In other words, partitives often combine an indefinite determiners with a definite determiner. It should also be noted that some linguists consider The Partitive Constraint to be problematic, since there may be cases where the determiner is not always obligatory.

Linguists do, however, agree that universal quantifiers, such as: every, and each, cannot be embedded in the partitive position. Furthermore, the second determiner can be "all" only if the first determiner is a superlative, or fractional expression. For example:

"The best of all the wines"

"15% of all the relationships"

It has also been hypothesized that perhaps "of" in sentences, such as the above, do not act as the partitive themselves, but rather the superlative in the sentence provides the role of partition.

Partitives are used as specifiers to noun phrases, and usually have a syntactic structure represented as:

Q + of + Det + NP

where Q is a quantifier or numeral. This structure shows that the partitive is actually a constituent of the functional category DP, and not included within the actual NP.

Partitives should not be confused with quantifiers, another form of nominal specifier. The two differ in the types of determiners they take, their specificity within a sentence, their internal agreement, the quantity of antecedents they provide to the relative clause, as well as the characteristic of extractability.