Guido Mensching (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)
On de-dislocation (pseudo-partitive) in Romance: Catalan and beyond
The aim of this paper is to present some new insights into the Romance construction
illustrated by the Catalan example in (1):
(1)
a.
b.
c.
Et
donaré
aigua.
you-CL. give-1SG-FUT water
'I'll give you water.'
D'aigua, t'
en
donaré.
of water you-CL. ADV.CL. give-1SG-FUT
T'
en
donaré,
d'aigua.
you-CL. ADV.CL give-1SG-FUT of water
Strikingly, the mass noun aigua in (1a) appears without the preposition (or partitive marker)
de, which only occurs in left and right dislocation contexts as in (1b,c), always in combination
with the "adverbial" clitic en (= French en, Italian ne). As has already been pointed out in the
literature, only languages that have this type of clitic show this phenomenon, i.e. French,
Italian, Sardinian, Catalan versus, e.g., Spanish and Portuguese. Sardinian and (most dialects
of) Catalan have no independent partitive construction, whereas French and – to a lesser
degree – Italian have. The main line of argumentation of the paper is that the structure in
(1b,c) is not a "real" partitive construction but part of a dislocation device found in split
DP/QP/NumP contexts. Apart from an attempt to approach the phenomenon within
minimalist phase theory, we shall observe some interesting phenomena that result from a
clash between the "real" partitive system (in the languages that have it) and the pseudopartitive system at issue.
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