The Syntax-Semantics Group will hold its next meeting on Monday, September14th, at 1-2pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department, 1085 Dr. Penfield. Online participants can join with this zoom link.
Austin Kraft (McGill) will be presenting “Partitives in Javanese.” Here is the abstract:
I present a new account for why partitives in Javanese (Austronesian) yield a different interpretation than partitive counterparts in languages like English. Constructions such as the English three of Mary’s tables exhibit “proper partitivity” (Barker 1998): Three of Mary’s tables are empty yields an inference that Mary has more than three tables in total. Meanwhile, Javanese partitives do not exhibit proper partitivity, raising the question of why proper partitivity appears in English but not Javanese. Building to an explanation, I first motivate the explicit syntax and semantics of Javanese partitives, appealing to “improper partitivity.” In delimiting the ways that numeral quantification and possession can co-occur in Javanese nominals, I hypothesize that (i) improper partitivity is the basic semantic relation of partitives in English and Javanese alike, and (ii) proper partitivity arises through pragmatic strengthening. For a pragmatic theory, proper partitivity appears when conditions for pragmatic strengthening are met (Ionin et al. 2006, Marty 2019), and it predicts a lack of proper partitivity when such conditions are not met. I argue that Javanese partitives fulfill this prediction.