On the Structure of English Partitive NPs and Agreement*

Syntactic and semantic complexities of English partitive constructions have given us many troubles in understanding English NP structures. The paper begins with the classification of partitive NPs into two types based on agreement factors and claims that enriched information on lexical entries can provide feasible generalizations for such constructions while capturing their syntactic and semantic properties in a systematic way. Rather than resorting to ad-hoc syntactic operations such as movement, the paper tries to show that the present lexicalist analysis can provide a viable alternative for the constructions in question.