L’anti-exhaustivité comme fonction linguistique
Anti-exhaustivity as a linguistic function

Summary/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, presupposingor 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 anonomasiological approach that includes both its literal and figurative expression, and its pragmaticimplications.The linguistic features performing this function are various, and may change from one languageto another, but there are some consistent typological relationships between the partitives of WesternFinno-Ugric languages and Basque, with fairly stable correspondences to the Baltic and Slavic genitiveand verbal aspect, the French and Italian partitive article, the Zero article of Ibero-Romancelanguages and the classifiers of Mandarin Chinese.

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