French de nominals and Russian non-canonical genitives. Are they partitive-like nominal expressions?
Abstract
The main goal of this paper is to provide a unified analysis of de nominals in French and noncanonical genitive nominals in Russian. Unlike previous literature that relies on partitivity, quantification and case assignment, we argue that a unified formal account can be substantiated by guaranteeing a uniform syntactic analysis of weak indefinite expressions not based on quantification, a semantic dependency of de nominals and non-canonical genitives to non-veridicality, and different linearization operations at Spell-out that guarantee concatenation of words or subwords (French de*n, Russian n⊕gen).
Fields of Study & Subjects
Syntax
Semantics
Linguistic Variation
Language Development and Disorders
Categorization
perception
and language
Publication details
- Journal / source
- Catalan Journal of Linguistics
- Volume
- 25
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 45–81
- Publication date
- 27 February 2026
- Language
- EN