Sensitivity to Underinformativity with Romanian Bare Partitives

This study presents Romanian bare partitives (BPs) in contrast to other bare partitive constructions and it shows that they share features with generalized partitives. The study also investigates the generation of scalar implicatures (SIs) by Romanian bare partitives in comparison to overt partitive structures in which the upper nominal contains a part quantificational noun. The Neo-Gricean and Post-Gricean approaches to SIs make opposite predictions with respect to these constructions. Through an experimental approach, the study finds that BP constructions in Romanian give rise to SIs about half of the time overt part noun partitive structures do. The results provide support for the Post-Gricean approach to SIs, according to which scalar implicature are not elicited easily because they come with extra computational costs. A second factor that lowers the rate of SI responses for BPs is their atelic, process interpretation.