(Axial) Parts and Wholes

Abstract

In this article I identify some Spanish words as AxParts (Svenonius 2006) and I discuss their properties, some of which have already been noted in the previous literature. I show that there are three characteristics of these elements that contrast with English AxParts, and I provide an analysis that allows a unified analysis of AxParts in Spanish and English by deriving all three differences from the same independent property: the syntactic representation of part-whole relationships. A second contribution of this article is that I argue that the difference between two series of AxParts that have been identified in Spanish follow naturally if the members of one of the series select a DP as their ground, while those of the second series take a phonologically empty pronoun.