Abstract
Italian and Italian dialects express indefiniteness in different ways, among which with a null determiner (ZERO) like all other Romance languages, but also with the definite article (ART) unlike what is found in Romance. Italian and some northern Italian dialects also display the so-called “partitive determiner” DI+ART, which is present in French. Few northwestern Italian dialects display (bare) DI, parallel to French. We adopt Cardinaletti and Giusti’s (2015, 2016) unified analysis and build on Cardinaletti and Giusti’s (2018, 2020) hypothesis that the variation and optionality in the distribution of the four determiners in regional Italian mirror their distribution in Italian dialects along two isoglosses: the ART isogloss spreading from the center of Italy towards north-west and south-east; and the DI isogloss spreading from Piedmont eastwards. We conduct a quantitative analysis on the results of a questionnaire in Piacentino and Rodigino. We test the distribution of the four determiners with mass and count nouns in two dimensions: sentence type (positive vs. negative) and predicate type (telic vs. atelic). The results confirm the hypothesis that the complexity of the determiner is related to its distribution highlighting two hierarchies of contexts: NEG < POS and ATEL < TEL. It also confirms that Piacentino, located at the crossroads of the ART and DI isoglosses, has more optionality than Rodigino, located at their borders.
Highlights
Italian presents a large variety of indefinite determiners, four of which are the logical combination of two elements and their silent counterparts: one is homophonous to the definite article and the other is homophonous to the preposition di ‘of’
Cardinaletti and Giusti (2015, 2016) argue that DI is an indefinite determiner, merged in SpecDP while ART is a bundle of gender and number features in D, as in (2): There are many reasons not to treat (1b) as a weak definite, among which the following
Focusing on the distribution of the different determiner types over telicity, we found a higher acceptance rate for ZERO in the atelic condition in both dialects, a higher acceptance rate for DI in the atelic condition for the Piacentino speakers (p < .001) and a higher acceptance rate for DI+ART in the telic condition for the Rodigino speakers (p < .001)
Summary
Cardinaletti and Giusti (2015, 2016) argue that DI is an indefinite determiner, merged in SpecDP while ART is a bundle of gender and number features in D, as in (2): There are many reasons not to treat (1b) as a weak definite (e.g. read the newspaper), among which the following (cf Leonetti 2019): (i) weak definites are common in Romance; (ii) they mostly involve (count) nouns in the singular; they follow strict lexical restrictions (e.g. read the book is not a weak definite). ART with indefinite interpretation is not possible in other Romance languages; it is limited to mass singular and count plural (parallel to weak indefinites) and it is not subject to lexical restrictions (cf Giusti 2021)
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