The independent partitive genitive in Lithuanian

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to give a semantic description of the independent or bare partitive genitive (IPG) in Lithuanian in rather neutral, functional terms. The IPG is a multi-faceted category that bears on the domains of quantification and (in)definiteness. On its quantificational reading, the IPG encodes an implicit quantifier, arbitrary in its value. I have used the notion of (un)boundedness (re-)introduced in Paul Kiparsky’s (1998) seminal paper on the partitive case in Finnish. NP-internally, the IPG has two main readings: unbounded and bounded reading. The first reading provides the concept of the participant rather than ‘zooming in’ on particular instantiations. It is extremely weak referentially, probably the weakest option available in Lithuanian. This reading is restricted to those verbs in Lithuanian that allow their arguments to be kind-referring NPs (e.g., the subject of the existential to be, or object of to know). On the bounded reading, in turn, the IPG encodes an undetermined but delimited set, the reading is existential and resembles indefinite plurals. The individuals introduced by this reading are stored in the discourse model and may be picked up by anaphoric pronouns in the following discourse. They never constitute primary or foregrounded information of the message, though. Furthermore, I have claimed that the incremental-theme verbs and verbs of transfer in East Lithuanian interact with the IPG-marked object with respect to their aspectual properties. Here only the bounded reading of the IPG is available. This explains the ban on the occurrence of IPG in imperfective contexts in Lithuanian (such as progressive, which has no grammatical marking in Lithuanian, generic and iterated atelics) with incremental-theme verbs, because the imperfective interpretation induces an inherently unbounded event which is not compatible with the bounded reading of the IPG. Both bounded and unbounded values are assumed to be originally two different readings of the same implicit quantifier that have, however, acquired different distributions in the course of time.

Partitive subjects in Estonian dialects

“…Such uses are more common and widespread in Estonian than in Finnish, especially in instances where the subject is a speech act participant referred to by a personal pronoun (Huumo and Lindström 2014). Similar usages have been observed in Northern Russian as well, using the partitive genitive instead of the nominative (Seržant 2014). Seržant explains these usages as expansions of the non-referentiality reading from the NP to the whole situation.…”

“…The difference may be a result of Russian influence, which has been strongest in the Seto area, spoken on the southeastern border with Russia. Although the partitive genitive used in North Russian is in certain respects similar to Estonian and Finnic languages (Seržant 2014), its use in affirmatives in Russian dialects is more restricted than in Estonian and is almost extinct in Standard Russian (except for some few verbs with prefixal quantifiers such as pri-byt' 'to increase', Ilja Seržant, p.c. ).…”

“…Seržant explains these usages as expansions of the non-referentiality reading from the NP to the whole situation. (Seržant 2014) Semantically, it can also be explained by the holistic viewpoint over the event (Huumo 2003), i.e. the event is conceptualized from an external viewpoint and not from the viewpoint of the topical participant.…”

The Independent Partitive as an Eastern Circum-Baltic isogloss

“…Nau, 2014;Seržant, 2014aSeržant, , 2014b, Modern Standard Russian, southern and eastern Russian subdialects only sporadically attest the ip(g) in the subject position (Kuz'mina, 1993: 114). In Latvian, the ip(g) is attested only in the earlier language layers such as folklore texts or in some more archaic subdialects but not in the present day language.…”

“…Selectional Restrictions on the np Modern Standard and even Middle Russian (Krys'ko, 2006: 225-6), as well as Lithuanian (Seržant, 2014a) and, to a much greater extent, Latvian (Berg-Olsen 1999) impose considerable restrictions on the lexical input of the ip(g), especially when the latter is used on its np-internal readings. Here, Lithuanian allows only for mass nouns, abstract nouns and plurals to be marked with the ip(g).…”