Editing Partitive (section)

===Quantifier-based approach===
Closely related to the partitive PP approach, some authors propose an alternate analysis which also focuses on looking at partitive distribution in nominals. Vos claims that it is the relationship between the quantifier and the noun collectively determine the partitive meaning.<ref name="Vos">Vos, H. M. (1999). A grammar of partitive constructions.</ref>

Under this view, the preposition belongs to a functional category and its existence is solely for grammatical reasons. In other words, the preposition is not registered with any lexical content. Vos claims the internal relation between the first and second noun in a nominal partitive implicitly denotes a subset-set, possessive or part-whole relation. Similarly, de Hoop embraces the idea that only when a quantifier pairs with a desired type of DP, specific kind of partitive relation can then be determined.  The preposition "of" plays a crucial role in enabling the selected DP to surface.

The deciding factor to label a partitive construction concerns with the presence of an '''internal DP''', as demonstrated in the English examples below:

[[File:Quantifier.png|thumb|Syntactic tree of English partitive "Three of my friends" under a quantifier-based approach. Note that in a partitive, the noun is embedded in a DP and the preposition of is a functional element, i.e., without lexical content.]]

{| class="wikitable" style="margin: 1em auto 1em auto;"
|-
! Partitives !! Pseudo-partitives
|-
| three of '''my friends''' || three friends of mine
|-
| many of '''those books''' || many books
|-
| a group of '''those tourists''' || a group of tourists
|-
| a piece of '''this cake''' || a piece of cake
|-
| a glass of '''the red wine''' || a glass of red wine
|}

The nouns in the partitives all refer to a particular bigger set since they are preceded by an internal definite determiner (possessive: ''my'', demonstrative: ''this'' and ''those'', and definite article: ''the''). On the other hand, their pseudo-counterparts lack this implication. Without a definite determiner, pseudo-partitives can only denote an amount of things, and the characteristics of a set are determined by the context of the discourse. In addition, the set denoted in a pseudopartitive does not necessarily have to be bigger.

Intuitively, the last two phrases under the pseudo-partitive column do indicate some kind of partition. However, when they are broken down into [[Constituent (linguistics)|syntactic constituents]], noted in true partitives, the noun always projects to a DP. In contrast, the noun in the phrase-final position projects to a NP (noun phrase) in non-partitives.