Partitivity across domains

This introduction provides an overview of current research on partitivity. The contributions in this volume collectively address several persistent challenges in the analysis of partitivity, such as (i) the semantic underspecification of partitive markers, which are not always transparently associated with the part–whole relation; (ii) the connection between partitive markers and indefiniteness and negation; (iii) the diachronic development of partitive markers and their relation to other categories, such as determiners and prepositions; and (iv) the syntactic structure of binominal constructions. Overall, we hope that these contributions advance our understanding of the many empirical and theoretical problems that partitivity poses for linguistic theory.