The Indefinite Article as an Exponent for Partition
Abstract
The article deals with the phenomenon of the indefinite article occurring with mass nouns of the type I brauch a geld (‘lit. I need a money’), inducing a partition reading for a vague amount. After a survey of its distribution in the Southern German dialects Bavarian and Alemannic, based on a large-scale empirical investigation, the paper focusses on the fine-grained distinction between subsets and subkinds whereby the latter occur with the indefinite article in all variants. A fine-grained functional structure is suggested where the respective functional heads are immediately adjacent, giving rise to the possibility of extending the indefinite article to subsets.
Submitted: June 9, 2023 | Accepted: July 19, 2023 | Published May 16, 2024 | Language: en
Keywords Mass noun • Partition • Bavarian • Indefinite article • Subkinds • Alemannic • Kinds
Copyright © 2024 Ellen Brandner. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
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