September 20, 2023

20.09.2023 Michael Rießler (UEF): “Partitive Case in Kildin Saami (new old evidence)”

Abstract

The existence of morphological partitive in the case inventory of the eastern-most Saami varieties is a well-known phenomenon. But typically, descriptions focus on partitive use governed by higher numerals and other quantifiers and existing descriptions are incomplete regarding the morphology of this case and do not present complete inflectional paradigms for all types of nominals. They are missing particularly in the paradigms of various pronominal forms. The syntactic environments where partitive is governed have also not been described systematically yet. According to my data partitive is regularly governed a) by quantifiers in noun phrases, b) by comparatives in adjective phrases, and c) by several adpositions. In addition, partitive can occur as an agreement feature inside noun phrases.

Whereas the main aim of this paper is linguistically sound descriptive grammaticography, even the overlap between our work and prescriptive language planning will be discussed.