The role of the plural system in Romance

A Protocol for Indefinite Determiners in Italian and Italo-Romance

“…The subject/object asymmetry found in Spanish is widespread across Romance (Stark 2008a(Stark , 2008b(Stark , 2016Carlier and Lamiroy 2018).…”

Why “Partitive Articles” Do Not Exist in (Old) Spanish

“…Theoretical and Typological Background Some Romance languages are known for a typologically highly marked element, namely an indefinite determiner encoding mass in the singular (Herslund 1998;Stark 2008aStark , 2008bStark , 2016Giusti 2016a, 2018). 2 Despite their being "DP-argument languages" in Chierchia's (1998) parametrization, that is, languages without nominal classifiers in the strict typological sense, Romance languages and varieties feature a systematic opposition between mass and count interpretations (= reference to portions vs. atomic units, individuals, see below) of the nominal predicate, for example 'bread' in (1) and(2).…”

“…Schurr, this volume, and Stark and Gerards, this volume), whereas they do not exist in Modern Ibero-Romance varieties (see Section 3), central and southern Italian varieties or Romanian (see Bossong 2016; also Giusti, this volume). These latter languages and varieties admit bare plurals and bare singulars in argument position, contrary especially to French, and to a lesser extent to non-central and non-southern Italian varieties (Stark 2008a(Stark , 2008b(Stark , and 2016. We would like to put forward the hypothesis that the (non-)existence of "partitive articles" and their complementary distribution with bare plural arguments is causally linked to the (non-)availability of a dedicated nominal plural morpheme (cf.…”

“…Plurals in Modern Romance (and generally Indoeuropean) varieties are thus classifying plurals in the sense that they unambiguously denote sets of sets (cf. already Link 1983;Borer 2005, 127), contrary, for instance, to Latin, where plurals could also denote intensive manifestations of the noun's denotation or collectives (Stark 2008b). Overt quantifiers and numerals, including the indefinite article deriving from the numeral 'one' , explicitly assign a specific quantity to the expression.…”

“…In a Pan-Romance perspective, "partitive articles" are in complementary distribution with unambiguous, agglutinative plural markers (like -s in Spanish amigo-s, 'friend-s'), and lead to a mass reading of the respective nominal. We will argue that their existence is due to a (partial) diachronic loss of unambiguous number markers, that is, vocabulary items (vi) to express interpretable φ-features (number) on nouns and general agree requirements inside nominals (Stark 2008b;Mathieu 2009). We will follow Borer (2005, 93) in assuming identity for elements in complementary distribution across languages and argue that the de-element in Romance "partitive articles" realizes the same functional head as agglutinative plural morphemes.…”