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Linguistic Variation: Online-First Articles

Methods for studying variation in partitives

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In the last sixty years, starting with the method of introspection to judge the acceptability of linguistic data, research methods in linguistics have become more varied and more sophisticated. This also holds for studies on partitivity. In this paper various methods are presented that have recently been used in the literature to study variation in the linguistic expression and the use of partitive constructions and partitive elements in Romance, Germanic and some other languages, language varieties and dialects. It is argued that different types of research call for adapted methods. It is shown that the use of different methods may lead to different results, although this is not always the case. The overview presented in this paper reveals that in recent years much progress has been made in the study of variation in partitives.

Keywords: partitive construction, partitive case, partitive determiner, partitive pronoun, methodology
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Partitives and variation
  • 3.Methods to detect variation in the linguistic expression or use of partitives
    • 3.1Partitive constructions
    • 3.2Partitive case
    • 3.3Partitive determiners
    • 3.4Partitive pronouns
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • List of glossing abbreviations
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 17 May 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.24018.sle
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