English Partitive Constructions: A Feature-based Approach

The purpose of this paper is to provide an internal and an external structures of English Partitive Constructions (EPC). From the superficial level, the EPCs look like either a Quantifier Phrase (QP) or a Determiner Phrase (DP), although there are diverse accounts and perspectives on Partitives and Pseudo-Partitives (Vos 1993, Baker 1995: 168-171, Huddleston and Pullum 2002, Ihsane 2005, Seelman and Ihsane 2006, Rutkowski 2007, Stickney 2007, Hamawand 2014). In this work, I clarify the types of English Partitives, and then show that the QP-Partitives (Cardinaletti & Giusti 1989) are actually just another instance of the DP-Partitives; QP-Partitives are the ones encapsulated within a higher DP, in which the QP being the Complement of a null D. The obvious advantages of the current analysis include the following: first, the alleged Number Mismatch (Longenbaugh 2017) or more comprehensively put, the choice over the Plural and Singular agreement in ‘one+of+the+ [Plural+Noun][RC....V...] construction’ (Quirk et al 1985: 765, Burchfield 1996: 551, Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 506, Swan 2005: 522) can be accounted for in a principled manner, if the current proposal is employed. Furthermore, the term ‘number mismatch’ (Longenbaugh ibid) is a misnomer in that there is no ‘number mismatch’, per se, under the current research. Additional supporting evidence for my proposal is attested along with a mechanism, Feature Percolation (Ross 1967, Hudson 2013). The ramifications of this proposal include that there are features such as [Num] that undergo percolation other than, let say, [Wh].