L’anti-exhaustivité comme fonction linguistique

Abstract

Just as the lexicon can designate certain entities by distinguishing their totality from their parts, grammar makes it possible to actualize a semantic category in discourse by affirming, presupposing or denying the existence of other instances of it, apart from those mentioned in the utterance. We propose a contrastive analysis of this general function, which we call anti exhaustivity, in an onomasiological approach that includes both its literal and figurative expression, and its pragmatic implications. The linguistic features performing this function are various, and may change from one language to another, but there are some consistent typological relationships between the partitives of Western Finno-Ugric languages and Basque, with fairly stable correspondences to the Baltic and Slavic genitive and verbal aspect, the French and Italian partitive article, the Zero article of Ibero-Romance languages and the classifiers of Mandarin Chinese.