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Central semantic of value partitive article

Morphological criterion

  1. The partitive article belongs to the paradigm of du. It is a compound unit de + definite article, with du as fused form of de + le.

Test

Given X an article, If X belongs to the paradigm of du, X is a partitive article.

Notice that we decided to consider des always as indefinite article, and not in some contextes as partitive article, because it is not obvious to handle the disambiguisation between an indefinite and a partitive article.