Speaker: Thom Westveer (UvA)
Title: Partitive constructions meet gender agreement: Gender agreement mismatches in French and German partitives
Date: Thu 21 Dec
Location: Lipsius 2.17
Time: 16:15-17:30
In languages with overt gender agreement morphology, partitive constructions involving human referents may give rise to mixed agreement (cf. Corbett, 1991). In the superlative partitive in (1a-b), a female student is selected out of a set of female and male students.
(1) a. ??Le/La plus jeune des étudiants est Marie.
the.m/.f comp young of.the student(m).pl is Marie
b. ??Der/Die jüngste der Studenten ist Marie.
the.m/.f young.sup of.the student(m).pl is Marie
In French and German, this set of females and males is typically referred to using a generic masculine plural. Yet, should the superlative referring to the female student Marie take the feminine form, in accordance with its referent’s biological sex, or the masculine form, to agree with the grammatical gender of the set noun? Grammaticality judgements show that native speakers of both French and German prefer the superlative to take the feminine form, resulting in a gender mismatch between subset and set.
Interestingly, speakers of French do not accept a mismatch between set and subset in a quantified partitive (2a); they prefer the quantifier to take the masculine form. Speakers of German, by contrast, still prefer a mismatch (2b), although their acceptance seems to be lower than for superlative partitives.
(2) a. ??Une/Un des étudiants est Marie.
one.f/.m of.the student(m).pl is Marie
b. ?Einer/Eine der Studenten ist Marie.
one.m/.f of.the student(m).pl is Marie
These observations raise at least two questions that should be addressed by a theoretical account: (i) how to explain the contrast between quantified and superlative partitives, and (ii) how to explain the difference between French and German.
Although the theoretical analysis of partitive constructions received considerable attention – at least for quantified partitives (e.g., Cardinaletti & Giusti, 2017) – gender agreement in partitives has, to the best of my knowledge, only been discussed by Sleeman & Ihsane (2016). They account for the contrast between quantified and superlative partitives in French by arguing that superlative partitives, but not quantified ones, have a more complex syntactic structure that allows for late insertion of a gender value, which can result in a gender mismatch between set and subset. While Sleeman & Ihanse’s (2016) analysis can explain the French data, it falls short when confronted with the German pattern. Furthermore, their analysis assumes that a partitive’s structure contains a PP, which seems inadequate for the German data, as canonical partitives in German do not contain a preposition, but exhibit genitive case marking of the set DP instead.
In my talk, I will propose an alternative analysis of partitive constructions, which also attempts to account for gender agreement (cf. Westveer, 2021). The syntactic analysis of partitives builds on a proposal by Den Dikken (2006) for qualitative constructions involving of in English (e.g., an idiot of a doctor): I will assume both French de and German genitive case marking in partitives to be overt realisations of a relator element, which functions as a nominal copula. In partitives, this relator links subset to set, expresses a belong-type interpretation, and is realised as the head of a small clause (labelled PredP) (3a).
(3) a. [PredP [Spec e][Pred de][DP les étudiants]]
b. [QP [Q un][PredP [Spec e][Pred de][DP les étudiants]]]
c. [DP [D le][FP plus jeune][PredP [Spec e][Pred de][DP les étudiants]]]
To account for the differences between quantified and superlative partitives, I will argue that in quantified partitives, a QP selects the small clause (3b), whereas in superlative partitives, it is selected by a more complex construction, involving at least a DP and some functional projection to host the superlative adjective (3c). Crucially, a superlative partitive is headed by a DP, a projection establishing a clear link to a referent in discourse, which increases the likelihood of taking into account the gender of the referent. In this, I follow Steriopolo & Wiltschko (2010), who claim D to be the location of what they label ‘discourse gender’.
Within the analysis I propose, two conditions mediate the possibility of a gender mismatch: (i) a structural difference between quantified and superlative partitives – as stipulated above – and (ii) the overtness of morphological gender cues on the set DP. That is, in the plural in German, gender is only marked on the noun, whereas in the plural in French, determiners and adjectives are marked for gender through agreement as well. This, I assume, may explain the difference in acceptability of gender mismatches between French and German. In a next step, I will discuss how the analysis does not only account for the general patterns, but can also accommodate (speaker) variation.
Selected references
Cardinaletti, Anna & Giuliana Giusti. 2017. Quantified expressions and quantitative clitics. In Martin Everaert & Henk C. van Riemsdijk (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Syntax (2nd edn.), 1-61. John Wiley & Sons. | Corbett, Greville G. 1991. Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. | den Dikken, Marcel. 2006. Relators and Linkers: The Syntax of Predication, Predicate Inversion, and Copulas. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. | Sleeman, Petra & Tabea Ihsane. 2016. Gender mismatches in partitive constructions with superlatives in French. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 1 (1), 1-25. | Steriopolo, Olga & Martina Wiltschko. 2010. Distributed GENDER hypothesis. In Gerhild Zybatow, Philip Dudchuk, Serge Minor & Ekaterina Pshetoskaya (eds.), Formal Studies in Slavic Linguistics, 155-172. New York: Peter Lang. | Westveer, Thom. (2021). Gender mismatches in partitive constructions in French and German. Amsterdam: LOT.