Contact-induced change in the languages of Europe: The rise and development of partitive cases and determiners in Finnic and Basque

This paper explores the hypothesis of contact-induced change for the
rise of the partitive case in Finnic languages and of the partitive case/determiner
in Basque. On the basis of the well-established Indo-European partitive-genitive
case and taking into account the lack of such a basis on the Uralic side, we
argue that the partitive case in Finnic languages has arisen as a result of BaltoSlavic influence. Concerning the Basque partitive determiner, we likewise suggest a contact scenario (with Romance languages) as being responsible for the
development of an entire system of determiners, including the definite and
possibly the indefinite article as well as the partitive marker, which originates
in an old ablative ending but crucially lacks the morphological properties
characteristic of Basque inflectional markers.