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Recent synchronic and diachronic studies agree on the fact that ‘article-like’ des in French (henceforth desal) should not receive a partitive analysis. This paper zooms in on this debate and shows that the approaches put forward to circumvent a partitive analysis of desal come with a number of challenges. After having identified these challenges, we broaden our perspective towards bare partitives (i.e. partitive structures without an upstairs determiner) in French, Italian and Dutch. Especially this latter language is particularly interesting as its bare partitives have not undergone a process of fossilisation. On the basis of these comparative data, we present an analysis of desal as a member of the family of bare partitives. We argue that this partitive approach of desal not only adequately accounts for the synchronic and diachronic facts, but is also more elegant from a theoretical point of view and has a larger empirical coverage.

This article discusses the development of the contrastive-partitive function of the possessive =eš in colloquial Persian. Examples of colloquial Persian show that the third person singular clitic pronoun =eš in some adnominal possessive constructions does not refer to any obvious referent present either in the syntactic structure (co-text) or in the situational context. Instead, the function of =eš, namely contrastive-partitive, is to mark the host as a part and contrast it with other parts of the similar set. The same function is attested in a few languages of Uralic and Turkic group. We believe that the same development has been occurred in possessive =eš in Persian. To describe the process of the development of the contrastive-partitive function, authentic colloquial examples from Internet blogs and formal examples from a historical corpus of New Persian are investigated. It is argued that this non-possessive function of =eš has originated from the whole-part relation in cross-referencing possessives, where both the lexical and clitical possessor =eš are present. The presence of the lexical possessor facilitates the loss of referentiality in =eš and it is developed to denote partitivity. Furthermore, the pragmatic motivation of communicating contrast makes =eš to be further grammaticalized into denoting contrastive-partitive function.

Manzini and Savoia (1999, 2001, 2002, to appear) argue that the basic facts about the clitic string are best accounted for without having recourse to anything but a minimalist syntactic component, i.e. making no use of a specialized morphological component nor of optimality-type comparisons between derivations/ representations. In particular, they assume that clitics correspond to specialized inflectional categories, and are merged directly into the positions where they surface; such categories are furthermore ordered in a universal hierarchy, as we will detail below. The aim of the present paper is to consider datives in the light of this framework. We will conclude that there is no evidence for the category dative in the Romance dialects we shall consider, while in fact there is evidence for categorizations of so-called dative clitics as quantificational elements or as deictic elements (locatives). In all cases, the relevant categorization relies entirely on referential properties, or more generally on interpretive properties intrinsic to the lexical items involved, calling into question the traditional notion of Case itself., Manzini i Savoia (1999, 2001a, 2001b, en premsa) defensen que els fenòmens bàsics que afecten les seqüències de clítics s'expliquen millor només fent referència a un component sintàctic minimalista, és a dir, sense fer ús d'un component morfològic especialitzat o comparacions dins el marc de l'Optimitat entre derivacions i representacions. En particular, aquests treballs assumeixen que els clítics són categories de flexió especialitzades que s'adjunten directament a les mateixes posicions on després apareixen; a més, aquestes categories estan ordenades dins una jerarquia universal, tal com s'explica en l'article. L'objectiu d'aquest article és examinar el comportament de la categoria datiu des d'aquesta òptica. Conclourem que no hi ha evidència a favor de la categoria datiu en les llengües romàniques que examinem, sinó que hi ha evidència a favor de la categorització dels anomenats clítics de datiu com a elements quantificats o com a elements díctics(locatius). En tots els casos, la categorització emprada dependrà del tot de les propietats referencials, o més generalment, de les propietats semàntiques intrínsiques a les entrades lèxiques involucrades, fet que fins i tot posa en cuestió la noció tradicional de Cas.