N1-of-N1 Constructions? Is There Such Thing?

Much (if not all) of the literature written on pseudopartitives so far has dealt with the so-called N-of-N constructions, or, in another denomination, the N1-of-N2 constructions ('a cup of coffee', 'a beauty of a woman'). But nothing has been said about constructions in which, for some more or less strange reason, N2 happens to be the same as N1. The obvious question is why.Is there no such construction as the N1-of-N1 construction? Or is it simply the case that linguists have not paid enough attention to the empirical matter they were supposed to deal with? The aim of the following paper is to try and give an answer to the questions above. In so doing, the paper will mainly focus on Romanian data, and test whether constructions such as 'băiat de băiat' (‘boy of boy’), fată de fată (‘girl of girl’) a. o. can be subsumed under the name of “qualitative N-of-N constructions”, which we will refer to by means of the term ‘binominal’. The paper starts by discussing qualitative pseudopartitives in English (such as a marvel of a boy), showing that there are no qualitative pseudopartitives in English in which N1 is the same as N2 (*'a boy of a boy', *'a beauty of a beauty'), and argues that this is the result of the redundant interpretation that would thus ensue. The paper then goes to discuss the Romanian construction 'băiat de băiat' (‘boy of boy’), meaning ‘băiat de succes’ (‘boy of success’), ‘successful boy’ (but in a slightly pejorative sense), and argues, that, although superficially it might look like a binominal construction, it is not actually one neither from a semantic, nor from a syntactic point of view. From a semantic point of view, there is no restriction as to the class of nouns which can occur in N1, as there is in the case of binominals (where they have to be evaluative). The interpretation received by the nouns is different in the two cases. While in the case of binominals, N2 is referential, and N1 is evaluative, in the case of the constructions 'băiat de băiat' (‘boy of boy’), 'maşină de maşină' (‘car of car’) a.o., the head is rather the first noun (N1), and the modifier of N1 is N2. Moreover, it may be argued, that although the nouns băiat and băiat have the same phonetic form, they do not actually have the same meaning (and are thus not the same noun): 'băiat1' means ‘boy’, while 'băiat2' means ‘boy worthy of the name ‘boy’’. From a syntactic point of view, the construction 'băiat de băiat' fails to behave like a binominal. According to N. Corver (1988), binominals exhibit a particular behaviour with respect to (i) extraction of the of-phrase, (ii) selection of the predicate N2, (iii) transparency phenomenon, (iv) N2 not behaving like a DP, (v) recursivity, (vi) impossibility of N2 extraction. In the paper we show that other constructions exhibit the same behaviour in (i), (iv), (v) and (vi) as well, so the tests are not reliable indicators of binominality. As for (ii) and (iii), the construction 'băiat de băiat' behaves differently from binominals: it does not seem to be the case that the verb selects the second noun in the nominal (1), and adjectives enter into a modification relation with N1, not N2 (2): (1) a. Ion a cunoscut o sărmaluţă de fată. ‘Ion has met a meat roll of girl.’ b. #Ion a cunoscut o sărmăluţă. ‘Ion has met a meat roll.’ c. Ion a cunoscut o fată de fată. ‘Ion has met a girl of girl.’ d. Ion a cunoscut o fată. ‘Ion has met a girl.’ (2) a. un simpatic băiat de băiat ‘a lovely boy of boy’ b. o simpatică minunăţie de băiat ‘a lovely marvel of boy’ Taking these into account, băiat de băiat constructions cannot be syntactically analyzed as involving predicate inversion, as binominals are (den Dikken 1998). Starting from this intuition, the paper proposes a syntactic representation for the construction which blends together Kayne’s antisymmetry (1994) and silent nouns (2005) and Zamparelli (2000)’s Split DP Hypothesis, arguing that, in fact, 'băiat de băiat' is to be analyzed as [RP [KIP băiat] [R’ [R0 de (of) [KIP TIP (TYPE) [K’ K0 [NPbăiat]]]]], a Residue (Partitive) Phrase which is embedded into PDP (Predicate Determiner Phrase), and can further on merge with a SDP (Strong Determiner Phrase), thus accounting for the distribution of the construction. The conclusion would be that Romanian does not have binominals making use of identical nouns, the construction 'băiat de băiat' cannot be considered a qualitative pseudopartitive, a conclusion which is cross-linguistically supported by the absence of binominals making use of identical nouns in English and other languages, and which invites a different syntactic analysis.