Partitive Constructions Meet Gender Agreement: What Agreement Mismatches Can Tell Us about the Syntactic Structure of Partitives

The syntactic structure of partitives received considerable attention in the literature (Cardinaletti and Giusti, 2017; Falco and Zamparelli, 2019), but most studies focussed on quantified partitives (one of the students), ignoring superlative ones (the youngest of the students). Yet, quantified and superlative partitives turn out to differ in terms of the acceptability of gender mismatches (Sleeman and Ihsane 2016; Westveer 2021). The present contribution discusses what the data on agreement mismatches in French and German partitives can teach us about their syntactic structure. Building on an analysis I proposed in Westveer (2021), I argue that the agreement data suggest (i) a structural difference between quantified and superlative partitives, and (ii) a structural difference between French and German quantified partitives. The novel analysis will be shown to provide a straightforward account for the attested differences in acceptability of agreement mismatches, but also to resolve some outstanding issues faced by previous analyses.