Indefiniteness

The expression of indefiniteness presents a wide degree of variation across languages. In addition to indefinite quantifiers such as alcuni 'some' or pseudo-partitive 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 determiners may 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 widespread forms of indefinite determiners, claiming that they are variants of one and the same syntactic structure, namely an indefinite operator in SpecDP, which may be either covert or realized by the uninflected form di, and a head D projecting the gender and number features of the nominal projection, which may also in turn be either covert or realized. These two dimensions of variation give 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 di+art with singular mass nouns is restricted to narrow scope interpretation, unlike di+art with plural count nouns, which may have wide or narrow scope interpretation. We then focus on the lesser studied central Italian dialect of Ancona, which provides further evidence for the different scope properties of indefinite mass vs. plural count nouns. The rest of the paper is devoted to a preliminary review of the cross-linguistic data reported by three AIS maps. 1 Although AIS was mainly collected to report lexical choices, the three maps set two mass nouns "water" and "wine" and one count plural nouns "violets" in postverbal position, namely 1037 "if there was water", 1343 "to go to the cellar to take wine", and 637 "to go and look for violets", which facilitate (although not univocally forcing) indefinite non-specific narrow scope. This will allow us to have a general picture of the realization of the core notion of indefiniteness in Italo-Romance varieties at the beginning of the century. The results of this preliminary study will make us raise questions on variation and optionality to be answered by future empirical work. 1. Six types of indefinite determiners in Italo-Romance In many languages, the morphosyntactic ways to express indefiniteness sort singular count nouns apart from singular mass and plural count nouns. In this section, we provide an overview of the many indefinite determiners found in Italian and in Italo-Romance dialects, starting with indefinite singular individuals and proceeding with the multifaceted ways to express indefinite mass and indefinite pluralities. 1.1. Italian and its dialects have an indefinite determiner un(o)/una which occurs with singular count 1 We have consulted the AIS maps thanks to Navigais, Tisato (2009).

The authors of the present article compare, through the prism of the referential approach, the functions and semantics of nominal groups composed by indefinite article + proper name (anthroponym) in Bulgarian and Italian languages. The referential approach reveals complex semantic structure and functional variability of both indefinite article and proper names. The analysis allows to consider in a broader perspective the semantical role of the category of definiteness / indefiniteness for the interpretation of the utterance.