Telicity, Specificity, and Complements with a “Partitive Article” in French

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze sentences with a des-complement, that is, a complement introduced by a so-called “partitive article” in the plural, and focus on the impact of this complement on the (a)telicity of the eventuality. Although des-complements generally occur in atelic sentences, we discuss some telic situations in which they are possible. To explain the acceptability of such sentences, we examine various semantic properties of these complements which could play a role in the telic interpretation, such as the presence/absence of an implicit quantity expression in the complement, their type of reference (quantized vs. cumulative; individuated) and specificity. We propose that the des-complements found in telic situations involve a quantity that is known and that this “knowledge” can be formalized in terms of epistemic specificity, as defined in Von Heusinger (2002a, 2002b and subsequent developments).