Semantics of the cardinal partitive construction

Abstract

This paper proposes a semantic analysis of cardinal partitive sentences such as Three of the boys left. Its three components are: (i) the traditional 'two NP-hypothesis' of Jackendoff (1977), (ii) the traditional semantics of the preposition of of Ladusaw (1982) and Hoeksema (1983), and (iii)  the  semantic  analysis  of  the  numeral  recently  suggested  in  Kobuchi-Philip  (2006b). Specifically, for a cardinal partitive DP such as three of the boys, the presence of a phonetically null classifier, a phonetically null NP, and a phonetically null determiner is hypothesized. These assumptions form the basis for the proposed unified semantic analysis, which accounts for the cardinal partitive sentence both in classifier languages such as Japanese and in non-classifier languages such as English.