---
title: "English partitives in Functional Discourse Grammar: types and"
description: "This matters because it replaces a long series of ad hoc constraints with one principled explanation. 40 references."
authors: ["Evelien Keizer"]
year: 2017
venue: "Glossa: a journal of general linguistics"
source: "https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/id/4878/"
doi: "10.5334/gjgl.11"
licence: "CC BY 4.0"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/keizer-2017-english-partitives-functional-discourse-grammar/"
---
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# English partitives in Functional Discourse Grammar: types and constraints

**Authors:** Evelien Keizer · **Year:** 2017 · **Venue:** [Glossa: a journal of general linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/glossa-a-journal-of-general-linguistics/) ([Glossa a journal of general linguistics 2017](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/glossa-a-journal-of-general-linguistics/2017/)) · **Publisher:** [Ubiquity Press](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/ubiquity-press/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.11) · [PDF](https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/4878/galley/12329/download) · [DOI 10.5334/gjgl.11](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.11) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2594167190)

**Citations:** 8 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
The paper asks why some English partitives (*one of the boxes*, *some of the cake*) are acceptable while others (*one of both books*, *many of objections*) are not. It also asks how these restrictions relate to the construction's internal structure. Earlier work treated those two questions separately. Keizer instead sorts partitives along two dimensions: whether the matrix NP denotes a set, and whether the heads of the matrix and embedded NPs are co-denotational. This yields four subtypes. Using authentic examples from BNC, COCA and the Internet, she shows that the well-known restrictions on the embedded NP affect only the two co-denotational subtypes, and that the restrictions follow from that shared-head relation. Partitives therefore need no special syntax: they are ordinary "N + of-PP" noun phrases with a particular head relation. The analysis is formalised in Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), whose separate pragmatic, semantic and morphosyntactic levels can encode each subtype. This matters because it replaces a long series of ad hoc constraints with one principled explanation.

## Key points
- The four partitive subtypes are subset-set, submass-mass, member-collection (*one of the couple/crowd*) and portion-entity (*some of the book*). They are defined by the ±set and ±co-denotational parameters.
- Earlier constraints all proved too strong or too weak when checked against corpus data:
  - Selkirk's (1977) Partitive Recursion Constraint required a definite, non-partitive embedded NP.
  - Ladusaw (1982) required specific reference.
  - Reed proposed discourse-pragmatic accounts.
- Attested examples such as *one of only a few middle-class… students* and *one of any possible environmental ethics* show that non-specific indefinite embedded NPs occur naturally.
- In FDG, the contrast between *one of both books* (bad) and *one of the two books* (fine) is handled by explicit marking. *Both* carries a distributive operator in underlying structure. With *the two*, distributivity is only a matter of interpretation.
- An abstract, lexically empty head is used for several cases:
  - impersonal *one*;
  - the split between *anyone* (+Hum) and *anything* (–Anim);
  - the split between the pronoun *anyone* and the quantifier-plus-pronoun *any one*;
  - pronominal partitives like *many of us*, where no noun can be restored because the embedded pronoun assigns no property.

## Interesting ideas
- Classify a construction by a small set of binary features, then test whether a known restriction holds only within certain feature cells; this localises constraints instead of patching a global rule.
- Treat partitives as ordinary N + of-PP phrases and locate the difference in the head relation rather than in special syntax; this keeps the grammar small.
- Distinguish distributivity that is coded in the form (*both*) from distributivity that is merely inferred (*the two*); this explains acceptability contrasts that semantic similarity alone cannot.
- Represent pronouns as abstract heads carrying only coarse features (+Hum, –Anim) and an operator; this separates *anyone* from *any one* and explains why *many of us* has no restorable head noun.
- Use attested corpus examples to test constraints that earlier work justified with invented starred sentences; claimed ungrammatical forms (*one of the crowd*) often turn out to be acceptable.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (tree): Partitive "N of NP" attachments could carry a subtype label from these two features, so the parser or a repair rule applies determiner checks only to co-denotational cases.
- **I2** (world): When building entities, *one of the boxes* can create a new entity linked by a subset relation to the set entity "the boxes", reusing the same machinery as other of-PPs.
- **I3** (frames): Frame and coreference logic can keep a "coded distributive" flag separate from an "inferred distributive" one, which helps decide plural-versus-individual readings of predicates.
- **I4** (world): Indefinite and partitive pronouns can map to entity templates with feature restrictions instead of lexical types, making their resolution explainable.
- **I5** (learn): Evaluation sets with negative controls should draw "bad" cases from data-checked judgments, so the system is not trained to reject real usage.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

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## Cite

Cite as: Evelien Keizer. 2017. English partitives in Functional Discourse Grammar: types and constraints. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@article{keizer2017english,
  title = {{English partitives in Functional Discourse Grammar: types and constraints}},
  author = {Evelien Keizer},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.11},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.11}
}
```

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## References

40 references, 3 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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39. How to cite this article: Keizer, Evelien. 2017. [English partitives in Functional Discourse Grammar: types and constraints](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/keizer-2017-english-partitives-functional-discourse-grammar/). Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 2(1): 16. 1–40, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.11 [↗](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.11)
40. Copyright: © 2017 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS [↗](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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