| Summary: | The paper aims at revisiting the relationship between the properties of (a)telicity and partitivity in Romanian. It is a better motivated extension of Crăiniceanu (2009). As before, we distinguish between two possible partitive constructions which are distinct in point of their VP aspectuality: bare partitive constructions (which form atelic VPs) and full partitive constructions (which form telic VPs). Both partitive constructions involve two noun phrases out of which one is phonologically deleted, i.e. they involve a “silent noun phrase” (Sauerland and Yatsushiro 2004). Since bare partitives have no intrinsic existential force (Le Bruyn 2008), their upstairs quantifiers are also deleted and the VPs they form are atelic, i.e. their theme object is not atomic, but rather incrementally homogeneous (Landman and Rothstein 2010). In contrast, the quantifier determiners are preserved in the structure of full partitives as they are intonationally focussed. Full partitive VPs are “once-only verbs” (Le Bruyn 2008) and the focussed quantity serves as “measured” theme object, turning the whole VP into a telic one.
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