Work

French de nominals and Russian non-canonical genitives. Are they partitive-like nominal expressions?

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: The main goal of this paper is to provide a unified analysis of de nominals in French and noncanonical genitive nominals in Russian. Unlike previous literature that relies on partitivity, quantification and case assignment, we argue that a unified formal account can be substantiated by guaranteeing a uniform syntactic analysis of weak indefinite expressions not based on quantification, a semantic dependency of de nominals and non-canonical genitives to non-veridicality, and different linearization operations at Spell-out that guarantee concatenation of words or subwords (French de*n, Russian n⊕gen).

Source: Catalan Journal of Linguistics

DOI: 10.5565/rev/catjl.517

Authors: Sonia Cyrino, M.Teresa Espinal

Institutions: University of Lisbon, Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Language: English

Topic: Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

Subfield: Language and Linguistics

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: diamond