Direct pseudo-partitives in US English

Abstract We present a corpus study looking at direct and indirect pseudo-partitives in US English and show that not only is there regular use of direct pseudo-partitives, but there is only positive evidence of their use with measure/portion readings as opposed to container+contents readings. We account for the data with an analysis in which of is a functional particle in measure/portion readings but is a lexical item specifying a contain relation in container+contents readings.