19 SPECIFICITY AND P ARTITIVITY IN SOME ALTAIC LANGUAGES JAKLIN KORNFILT & KLAUS VON HEUSINGER Syracuse University & Stuttgart University 1.xxIntroduction * Formal semantic studies as well as typological work have shown the importance of adopting a notion of specificity, in addition to definiteness. The question of the exact nature of specificity has been addressed, among others, by Enç (1991), where the widely accepted claim is made (and defended, in part based on DOM phenomena in Turkish) that specific NP/DPs are subsets of either explicit or implicit partitive expressions, and that partitive subsets have to be specific. The strongest empirical support for this claim was provided by the observation that partitive expressions, headed by the subset expression, must be marked with overt structural case. This observation is important, given that in Turkish, structural cases such as accusative and genitive show up typically on specific DPs but not on non-specific ones (cf., among others, Kornfilt 1984, 1997, and 2003a, and Johanson 1977; for discussion of overt accusative in particular, see Aydemir 2004, Dede 1986, Erguvanlı 1984; for discussion of DOM in general, see Aissen 2003 and Bossong 1985). * Previous versions and parts of this paper were presented at the LSA annual meeting in 2001 (Washington, DC), at the Workshop on the internal structure of DPs at Stuttgart University, in 2007, and at WAFL 5 (SOAS) in 2008. We thank the audiences for constructive comments. We are very grateful to our informants: Vügar Sultanzade (Azerbaijani), Kenjegül Kalieva (Kirghiz), Dildora Niyazmetowa (Uzbek), and Dolgor Guntsetseg (Mongolian). Special thanks go to Reiko Vermeulen for editing this volume. The first author thanks the College of Arts and Sciences of Syracuse University for an administrative leave in 2007/08, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig for a fellowship during the same time, which made the comparative Altaic part of her research for this paper possible. The second author acknowledges that the present work has been carried out as part of the project C2 “Case and referential context” of the collaborative research centre SFB 732 “Incremental specification in context” of the German Science Foundation.