The partive concept versus linguistic partitives: from abstract concepts to evidentiality in the Uralic languages
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Date
2014
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De Gruyter Mouton
Abstract
Several Uralic languages have cases that are referred to as the partitive; however, the semantics of these cases diverge from the generally assumed notion of partitive. All Uralic languages can, however, express the concept of part-whole relationships by means of a restricted set of constructions that typically contain juxtaposed bare nouns, elatives, or ablatives. Therefore, on the basis of examples of one language family, this paper made a distinction between Partitive Concepts that can be expressed by all Uralic languages and the morphological, linguistic partitives. A characteristic of the Uralic languages is that there are many source (separative) cases, and this article concentrated on the place of the partitive within the system of source cases. The interaction between TAM, definiteness, and the partitive can be observed in many areas: the aspectual DOM, definiteness effects, telicity, and case on non-finites. The Uralic languages are particularly rich in cross-categorial case, that is, the use of case formants as markers of verbal categories such as TAM categories. There are several processes that lead to case formants developing into TAM categories, two of which are disussed in connection with the source cases in the cross-categorial case systems. The source cases are different from each other in languages with many source cases in terms of cross-categorial case, and also different from non-source spatial cases