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EUROPEAN PARTITIVES IN COMPARISON
b. "Tudokinde gyé kock-yn.
she bread from eat-2PST.3SG
Intended to mean: "She ate some of the bread! (Elena Vedernikova,
pers. comm.)
4. THE CHALLENGE IN UNDERSTANDING PARTITIVES: THE EXAMPLE OF
URALIC OVERVIEWS
4.1 Challenges and possibilities
Understanding and even detecting partitives in various languages is compli¬
cated by the rather abstract nature ofthe linguistic concepts that have evolved
from the semantics of the core “part of the X” or “amount of X” semantics.
One of the challenges for researchers of partitives is that grammars are often
written following traditional grammar organizing principles, which may not
serve well the researcher of partitives. We have observed that viewing a lan¬
guage from the point of view of part-whole relationships is beneficial for
understanding how its grammar and categories could be explained in their
interrelationships. In this subsection, we look at some possibilities in grammar
descriptions where partitive related discussions emerge — or fail to emerge —
due to the fragmentation of the research agenda targeting the phenomenon.
We also suggest where such discussions could be more extensive or could have
been inserted, had there been a less fragmented research agenda available or
fewer constraints on space.
Uralic languages are one of the best language families researched in the
world, but even in this rich research situation, it is easy to miss relevant
connections in natural data, and it is difficult to interpret natural phenomena.
Two comprehensive recent handbooks on Uralic languages serve as the basis
for the discussion in this section, and we discuss them to guide research in
other morphologically rich languages that may also have evolved grammar
involving partitivity. The two recent handbooks or grammar guides on Uralic
languages are Abondolo and Valijarvi“ and Bakré-Nagy, Laakso, and Skribnik,®
from 2023 and 2022, respectively. The notes on Uralic are not intended as
criticism of the sources but rather as an indication of where a discussion of
partitives could assist a researcher in connecting related dots. We do not claim
44 Daniel M. Abondolo - Riitta-Liisa Valijärvi (eds.): The Uralic languages (Second edition),
London, Routledge, 2023.
46 Marianne Bakré-Nagy — Johanna Laakso - Elena Skribnik (eds.): The Oxford Guide to the
Uralic Languages, Ist ed., United Kingdom, Oxford University Press, 2022. https://doi.
org/10.1093/0s0/9780198767664.001.0001
+26 +