The agreement of collective DPS in Romanian

Romanian collective nouns do not allow plural agreement on the verb, unlike in British English. But when a collective noun is used with a partitive quantifier (e.g. o parte din guvern “part of the government”), plural agreement is possible. We propose an analysis for partitive quantification, which can account for plural agreement with partitive collectives, as well as with partitive plural DPs (o parte dintre studenţi “part of the students”). Our analysis is based on Higginbotham’s (1994) analysis of mass and plural D-quantifiers. Quantification is construed in terms of amounts of minimal parts; the minimal parts in the denotation of collective nouns are atomic entities. The partitive quantifiers transform a group denoting entity into a sum denoting entity.

Published online: 30 November 2011
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.318.15cro