Disentangling Bare Nouns and Nominals Introduced by a Partitive Article (original) (raw)
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Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics, 2022
Some Romance languages, like Spanish, encode narrow scope indefinite objects without any over determiner (Bare Nouns; como pan ‘I eat bread’), while others, like French, require the insertion of an overt prenominal marker, labeled Partitive Article (PA; je mange du pain ‘I eat bread’). This asymmetry has been related to overt number marking on the noun (Delfitto & Schroter, Stark 2016 a.o.), leading to the hypothesis that number morphs on N license indefinite arguments and that PAs appear in those languages in which they are absent. Languages as Italian, in which narrow scope indefinites can be introduced both by BNs and PAs, challenge this hypothesis. By enlarging the view to Northern Italian Dialects, we update the correlation with number marking (the relevant factor being the absence of number morphs on masculine Ns) and show that Italian-like languages are not problematic, once we develop an analysis of the alternation between PAs and BNs in these languages in terms of two kinds...
Studia Linguistica, 2021
This contribution focuses on indefinite arguments in object position. We address this topic from the point of view of the crosslinguistic variation within the Romance continuum, especially looking at Northern Italian Dialects (NIDs). The target is to describe the distribution of the different possible realizations of this kind of arguments in this area by means of an in-depth analysis of the data coming from the ASIt database and from three new fieldwork sessions. We show that the microvariation attested in this area reflects and refines the "macro" variation attested among the major Romance languages. The finegrained picture that can be drawn from a closer look to a set of minimally varying languages helps crosslinguistic comparison and, consequently, the modeling of more precise analyses.
Partitives and Indefinites: Phenomena in Italian Varieties
Studia Linguistica, 2021
This contribution examines the relation between genitives/ partitives and indefinites in some Italian varieties. A central question concerns the nature of the preposition de/di (DE) 'of' (< Latin de), specifically investigated in contexts where it does not introduce the usual possessive or partitive reading: bare partitives/Partitive articles of Italian varieties, negative contexts in which a negative marker select a partitive occurrence of DE of the type mia+DE in Northern Italian dialects and the linker-like element in Southern Italian dialects. We propose that these structures rely on the lexical content of DE, corresponding to the elementary relation part-whole and that their particular behaviour can be treated in the terms of pair-merge in the sense of Chomsky (2020). The indefinites in varieties devoid of the partitive article will be treated in the final section.
2021
In this paper, we focus on two constructions that allow preverbal subjects headed by a so-called partitive article in French, that is, sentences with a stage-level predicate and generic emphatic constructions. The aim is to explain why their counterparts were generally not accepted by speakers of Francoprovençal, an endangered and understudied Gallo-Romance language, in a translation task carried out in fieldwork in the Aosta Valley in Italy (Ihsane 2018, Stark & Gerards 2020). To account for our results, we propose that preverbal subjects in the two languages have different statuses and develop the typology of languages postulated by Dobrovie-Sorin & Laca (2003): we argue that there are more than two types of languages when it comes to the status of preverbal subjects and that Francoprovençal differs not only from French (Ihsane 2018), but also from languages like Spanish: it generally has topical subjects like Spanish but also allows some subjects that represent new information to occur preverbally. In contrast to French, however, this option is restricted to nominals that reach a certain degree of referential givenness (Gundel 2003).
Isogloss, 2023
In this paper, we focus on partitive articles (PAs), i.e., determiners which, generally, have an indefinite interpretation, and on one of their potential correlates, i.e., invariable DE, in Francoprovençal, a non-standardized, highly endangered Gallo-Romance language (cf. Zulato, Kasstan & Nagy 2018), and show the fine-grained spatial distribution of these elements in the Swiss and Aosta Valley (Italy) varieties.
Partitive objects in negative contexts in Northern Italian Dialects
Linguistics, 2020
In this article we analyze partitive objects under negation (NPOs) in the Northern Italian dialectal (NID) domain and discuss their diachronic and synchronic relation with both partitive constructions and partitive articles. We take into exam the areal distribution of the phenomenon, its syntactic variation and the different factors that regulate this variation. The main claim of the paper is that NPOs in the NIDs are a special type of grammaticalized partitive constructions, where negation licenses a silent quantifier and the preposition expresses extraction from a 'whole'. In other words, the development of NPOs is similar to that of partitive articles, but they have not lost the partitive meaning. This explains why they appear only with plurals and singular mass nouns.