The Indefinite Article as an Exponent for Partition

Abstract

The article deals with the phenomenon of the indefinite article occurring with mass nouns of the type I brauch a geld (‘lit. I need a money’), inducing a partition reading for a vague amount. After a survey of its distribution in the Southern German dialects Bavarian and Alemannic, based on a large-scale empirical investigation, the paper focusses on the fine-grained distinction between subsets and subkinds whereby the latter occur with the indefinite article in all variants. A fine-grained functional structure is suggested where the respective functional heads are immediately adjacent, giving rise to the possibility of extending the indefinite article to subsets.