The syntax of the Italian indefinite determiner dei

Exploiting microvariation: How to make the best of your incomplete data

“…In Garzonio and Poletto (2017) we have proposed that these structures contain a null quantificational noun, whose modifier is the negative marker, which is etymologically a minimizer. As shown in (11) for French, the partitive marker de is actually a real case marker and not simply an indefinite determiner as partitive articles (Cardinaletti and Giusti 2016). We argue that the variation observed in Figure 3 is based on three main factors: a) the (im)possibility to license the null noun, b) the type of null noun licensed (either amount or number or both), and c) the categorial status of the item of.…”

Telicity, Specificity, and Complements with a “Partitive Article” in French

“…a complement introduced by the so-called "partitive article" in the plural) and determine how this complement affects the telicity of the situation, that is, the involvement of a culmination or endpoint (cf. De Swart 2006).1 Historically, the article des 'of.the.pl' comes from the preposition de 'of' and the plural definite article les 'the.pl' (Carlier 2007) but nowadays generally has an indefinite interpretation and not a real partitive one in the sense of a part-whole relation (Storto 2003;Ihsane 2008;Cardinaletti and Giusti 2016a;a.o. ).2 To illustrate the issue we are interested in, let us consider 1 One way to distinguish between telic and atelic situations is to use en-'in' and pendant-'for' temporal adverbials (De Swart 2006;Guéron 2006): the former modify telic situations whereas the latter target atelic situations.…”

“Partitive Articles” in Aosta Valley Francoprovençal—Old Questions and New Data

“…In the literature, the existence of "partitive articles", that is, of indefinite mass determiners in the singular and of indefinite determiners in the plural, has been correlated either with non-existing dom-systems (Körner 1981(Körner , 1987; see Schurr, this volume, for a usage-based approach of the issue), that is, with some sort of complementary case-marking, or with the unavailability of inflectional information on nouns concerning declension class, gender and number (Stark 2008a(Stark , 2008b(Stark , 2016Gerards and Stark, in this volume), related to internal and external agreement of nominals and argumenthood. Besides purely morphosyntactic approaches to "partitive articles", semantic and distributional properties of these elements have also repeatedly been discussed in the literature for the two standard languages French and Italian (see Dobrovie-Sorin andBeyssade 2004, 2012;Zamparelli 2008;Cardinaletti and Giusti 2016a). Yet, virtually nothing is known about these aspects of "partitive articles" in minor Romance languages such as Occitan, Rhaeto-Romance or Francoprovençal, and even information on Catalan is scarce (but cf.…”