Indefinite Determiners: Variation and Optionality in Italo-Romance

The expression of indefiniteness presents a wide degree of variation across languages. In addition to indefinite quantifiers such as alcuni ‘some’ or pseudopartitive constructions such as un po’ di ‘a bit of ’, Italo-Romance varieties present at least five types of indefinite determiners that can combine with mass or plural nouns. Interestingly,more than one of these determinersmay be available in one and the same variety, producing a certain degree of optionality and / or a fine-grained distinction in the semantics of indefiniteness. In this paper, we concentrate on the most wide-spread forms of indefinite determiners, claiming that they are variants of one and the same syntactic structure. Assuming with Abney (1987) that the highest portion of the nominal structure (DP) includes two positions, a specifier (SpecDP) and a head (D), we take the indefinite operator, which provides the indefinite semantics, to occur in SpecDP, while the head D is specified for the gender and number features of the nominal projection. Both positions may be overt or covert. The indefinite operator can be realized by the uninflected form di, while the head D can be realized by the same form as the definite article. The option of filling either position with an overt or covert element gives rise to four different forms: the zero determiner, indefinite bare di, the so-called “partitive determiner” di+article, or the use of the definite article as indefinite determiner. We first show that in Italian, optionality is in some cases apparent, giving rise to subtle semantic differences. In particular, we show that in Italian, overt