Jaume Solà i Pujols - Departament de Filologia Catalana ...

(114) No agreement:
a. Il y a des enfants au jardin (French)
It there-has of-the children in-the garden
'There are children in the garden'
b. Arriba turistes (North-Western Catalan) 94
Arrives tourists
c. There's children in the garden (Coll. English)
0.b) could be characterized as follows. Suppose indefinite DPs involve a (possibly
empty) D o which may or may not inherit the number features of its complement NP. 95 If it does,
then we have Partitive DPs cum number. Otherwise, Partitive DPs do not have number
features. 96
Let us consider the following simplified D-structure:
94 See Rigau (1991), where an explanation is provided for the
contrast between languages showing verb number-agreement with
the indefinite and languages with no such agreement.
95 Actually, it is not crucial for the present purposes that
we have an empty D o : it could as well be an empty quantifier, if
we assume indefinite quantifiers and determiners are different
FCs, as proposed by many authors with several implementations
(Cardinaletti & Giusti (1991), Rigau (1991))).
96 French would be a language where Partitive DPs do not have
number features. We could argue that this is a related to the
fact that a preposition usually precedes the NP in French
Partitive DPs:
(i) Je mange beaucoup de pommes
I eat many of apples
(ii) Je ne mange pas de pommes
I Neg eat not of apples
and this preposition blocks number inheritance by the
determiner. However, other languages having similar prepositions
allow number in Partitive, so this account cannot be trivially
correct:
(iii) Catalan: moltes de pomes
many-fem-pl of apples(-fem)-pl
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