1 Setting the Scene
Several Romance languages, but also a few Germanic languages like Luxemburgish, feature, inside their systems of nominal determination, an element traditionally called “partitive article”. This article is generally found in contexts where many European languages like Spanish, English, or German have bare plurals and bare mass nouns, a parallel which led to various semantic analyses treating these nominal expressions analogously (Bosveld-de Smet 1998; Dobrovie-Sorin and Beyssade 2012; a.o.).
Examples (1) and (2) illustrate the “partitive articles” du/des (of.the) in French and del/dei (of.the) in Italian, historically a conflation of the prepositions de/di ‘of’ and the definite article, and their bare counterparts in the English translations.
|
(1) |
French |
||||||
|
a. |
Hier, |
Jean |
a |
acheté |
des |
livres. |
|
|
Italian |
|||||||
|
b. |
Ieri |
Gianni |
ha |
comprato |
dei |
libri. |
|
|
yesterday |
John |
has |
bought |
pa.pl |
books |
||
|
‘Yesterday John bought (some) books.’ |
|||||||
|
(2) |
French |
||||||
|
a. |
Hier, |
Jean |
a |
bu |
du |
vin. |
|
|
Italian |
|||||||
|
b. |
Ieri |
Gianni |
ha |
bevuto |
del |
vino. |
|
|
yesterday |
John |
has |
drunk |
pa.m.sg |
wine |
||
|
‘Yesterday John drank (some) wine.’ |
|||||||
Despite their label, “partitive articles”, mainly attested in modern Romance varieties, do generally not express a part-whole relation: this interpretation, deriving from a preposition de ‘of’ plus definite article, is limited to the object of a restricted class of verbs like ‘eat’ or ‘drink’ (Englebert 1992; Kupferman 1979). The most common interpretation of “partitive articles” is their indefinite use (Storto 2003; Le Bruyn 2007; Ihsane 2008; Cardinaletti and Giusti 2006, 2016, 2018): in (1), des livres/dei libri means ‘(some) books’ and, in (2), du vin/del vino means ‘(some) wine’. Indeed, singular “partitive articles” such as du in French Je bois du vin (‘I drink wine’), which are typologically highly marked, necessarily lead to a mass interpretation of the constituent they are part of. This is not expected in Indo-European languages at first glance as the mass interpretation—and for the plural, the non-specific indefinite interpretation—usually result from the absence of determiner, typically in bare nouns. (2) could in principle be ambiguous between the two meanings, indefinite and partitive, but out of the blue the complement is understood as ‘(some) wine’ and not as ‘some of the (definite) wine’. It is this indefinite interpretation of “partitive articles”, generally corresponding to bare nouns, that is at the heart of this volume. Since these “partitive articles” do generally not have a part-whole interpretation, the term “partitive article” is a misnomer. Despite that, this label is widely adopted in the literature which is why it is also used in this volume. The use of quotation marks with this term signals that it is a misnomer, hence misleading. To identify “partitive articles” with an indefinite interpretation in the data, the gloss pa is used in all the contributions of the volume.
Although there is abundant literature on both “partitive articles”, at least in Standard languages like French and Italian, and bare nouns in different languages, both phenomena, “partitive articles” and bare nominals, are usually treated apart in the literature (for French “partitive articles” cf. e.g., Kupferman 1979, 1994; Bosveld-de Smet 2004; Ihsane 2008; for Italian, Cardinaletti and Giusti 2016, 2018, 2020; for bare nouns cf. e.g., contributions in Kabatek and Wall 2013; Delfitto and Fiorin 2017, and the references therein, among many others). There is, to the best of our knowledge, no systematic comparison available to date as to their evolution and distribution (Section 2), on the one hand, and their interpretation and internal structure (Section 3), on the other hand, a gap that the contributions of this volume aim to reduce: all the papers collected crucially zoom in on aspects like the function, the semantics and the internal structure of nominals with a “partitive article” and of the potentially corresponding bare nouns, in a cross-linguistic perspective. More specifically, the eight selected articles take up, to different degrees, many notions at the syntax-semantics interface like existentiality, specificity, scope properties, individuated reference, and number/gender of the nominal, but also the connection between “partitive articles” and genitive case and the question whether the presence/absence of a “partitive article” impacts the aspectual properties of the eventuality, that is, (a)telicity, and the (im)possibility of having a kind or a generic reading.
2 Evolution and Distribution of “Partitive Articles”
Although Romance languages developed from Latin, not all of them have “partitive articles”. As Latin did not have articles, a question that arises is when and why (indefinite) bare nouns gave way to nominals with articles, especially “partitive articles” (Stark 2008a, 2008b, 2016). Although the evolution of “partitive articles” is addressed by Carlier and Lamiroy (2014), for instance, detailed diachronic studies and studies of other languages, also minor languages, are missing.
Why present-day Romance languages vary as to whether “partitive articles” are obligatory or not is another issue that is poorly understood: in French, there are no bare nouns in argument positions (except in special contexts like coordination, see Roodenburg 2004) and articles, including “partitive articles”, must be used; in standard Italian, in contrast, bare nouns seem to alternate with “partitive articles” (see Cardinaletti and Giusti 2016, 2018 for Italian):
|
(3) |
French |
||||
|
a. |
Je bois |
* |
(du) |
jus. |
|
|
Italian |
|||||
|
b. |
Bevo |
(del) |
succo. |
||
|
I.drink |
pa.m.sg |
juice |
|||
|
‘I drink juice.’ |
|||||
Other Romance languages do not have “partitive articles” at all but may feature a plural indefinite article (e.g., unos in Spanish, nişte in Romanian) in addition to bare nouns (Stark 2007; Carlier and Lamiroy 2014; Cardinaletti and Giusti 2016; Carlier 2016). Some Germanic varieties seem to have special “partitive markers”, but they remain the exception rather than the rule (Glaser 1993). Thus, the question of the grammaticalization of (partitive) articles and the diachronic changes in the referential properties of bare nouns arises.
Many issues related to the distribution of nominals containing “partitive articles” (and of their bare counterparts) also call for an analysis. For instance, French “partitive articles” may pattern with English bare nouns in some contexts (e.g., in (1)–(2) or with individual-level predicates as in *Des hommes sont blonds/*Men are blond; Guéron 2006), but not in others (e.g., generic sentences like Je déteste *des chats; *Des chiens aboient vs. I hate cats; Dogs bark). Many such examples with an individual-level predicate (Dobrovie-Sorin 1997a, 1997b) or a generic interpretation become acceptable despite the presence of a subject with a “partitive article” if the right kind of element is present in the sentence (e.g., adjective, negation …) (Roig 2013). This also raises the question about the functions nominal expressions with a “partitive article” can have, compared to bare nouns: are they restricted to some functions or not and if so why (cf. e.g., Ihsane 2018 on French and Francoprovençal subjects headed by a “partitive article”)?1 The role of the predicate and of operators, typically negation, in the distribution of nominals with “partitive articles” and of bare nouns needs thus to be accounted for. As is well-known, a “partitive article” is ungrammatical after a negation in Standard French as in *Marie n’ a pas lu des romans ‘Marie hasn’t read novels’.
3 Interpretation and Internal Structure
Another issue at the heart of this volume concerns the (lack of) correspondence between the interpretation of nominals with “partitive articles” and of bare nouns. For instance, several contributions of the volume discuss the presence/absence of a “partitive article” in connection to the event type (telic-atelic), and the possibility of having a kind reading or a generic interpretation.
Scope properties are also puzzling. Bare nouns, for example, are generally assumed to have only narrow scope, as in (4d) (Carlson 1977; Laca 1996; McNally 2004), except for Brazilian Portuguese (Wall 2017). In contrast, nominals with “partitive articles” are ambiguous between (4c) and (4d), just like (4a), although in Italian nominals with a plural “partitive article” take wide scope easily (Chirechia 1998; Zamparelli 2008; Cardinaletti and Giusti 2016), compared to the ones in French (Dobrovie-Dorin and Beyssade 2004, 2012; Ihsane 2008). Since this ambiguity only concerns nominals with a “partitive article” in the plural, nominals with a singular “partitive article” being unambiguous, the question arises what role number plays in these facts (Benincà 1980).
|
(4) |
Spanish (McNally 2004, 120) |
|||||||||
|
a. |
Hoy |
Juana |
tiene |
que |
leer |
unos |
artículos. |
(c or d) |
||
|
today |
Juana |
has |
that |
read.inf |
a.pl |
articles |
||||
|
‘Today Juana has to read some articles.’ |
||||||||||
|
b. |
Hoy |
Juana |
tiene |
que |
leer |
artículos. |
(d only) |
|||
|
today |
Juana |
has |
that |
read. inf |
articles |
|||||
c. (∃x: article(x)) [□ [read(j,x)]]
d. □(∃x: article(x)) [read(j,x)]
Singular and plural nominals with “partitive articles” do not only differ in number: the former are also mass, whereas the latter are count. How scope, number, individuated reference, and possibly additional notions like existentiality and specificity interact and are related to the indefinite interpretation of “partitive articles” remains to a large extent mysterious. Whether (some of) these notions are encoded in the syntactic structure of nominals with a “partitive article” and/or bare nouns, and if so how/where, also has to be formalised. This question arises for gender, as well, as gender plays a role in the distribution of bare nouns in different languages which do not have a “partitive article”, such as Brazilian Portuguese, for instance. The comparison between nominals with “partitive articles” and bare nouns will also enlighten the much-debated issue of the existence of an empty article in the structure of the latter (Longobardi 1994).
4 Content
The papers selected for this volume focus on the syntax and the semantics of nominals with a “partitive article” and/or a bare noun (i.e. bare plural or bare mass noun). Each paper addresses several of the issues mentioned in Sections 2 and 3 as many of the notions presented are intertwined. Below we give an insight of the topics covered, before providing a summary of each article (Section 5).
Among the semantic issues covered by the contributions of the volume, is scope. Scopal properties (or absence thereof) of nominals with a singular and/or a plural “partitive article” are discussed by Dobrovie-Sorin, who mainly focuses on negation in French, and by Giusti, who claims that scope properties may distinguish different types of indefinite determiners in Italian and Italo-Romance. Various facets of generic readings are addressed by Stark and Gerards, who look into generic emphatic sentences with a correcting purpose which seem to be ungrammatical in Francoprovençal, and by Giusti who contrasts weak indefinite determiners and definite articles in generic and episodic sentences (also studied by Stark and Gerards). Martin, Carvalho and Alexiadou account for an aspectual difference between pancake sentences (a special type of copular sentences) in Brazilian Portuguese, where they are generic in contrast to French, where they are ambiguous with an episodic interpretation. Dobrovie-Sorin deals with the kind reading of bare nouns, whereas Giusti compares definite nominals with a kind interpretation and definite nominals with an indefinite interpretation (allowed in similar contexts as nominals with a “partitive article”); Gerards and Stark propose a kind-oriented mode of talk for the definite noun phrases found in the constituents traditionally analyzed as headed by a “partitive article” in Old-Spanish and argue that these constituents are quantifier phrases without a “partitive article”; whether a complement with a “partitive article” affects the (a)telicity of an eventuality is studied by Giusti and by Ihsane, who both provide examples, of Italian varieties and French, respectively, with complements headed by a “partitive article” in telic contexts, which is unexpected. Giusti further investigates what she calls “specialized meanings” of the indefinite nominals she analyzes (e.g., small quantity, specificity, wide/narrow scope, etc.), whereas Ihsane analyzes the data at the heart of her contribution in terms of epistemic specificity. Specificity, but also referentiality, topicality, individuated reference, in prominence-conditioned patterns, are considered by Schurr. The sort/kind-of interpretation which comes with Germanic partitive markers is discussed by Strobel and Glaser, who also tackle the form of partitive markers in terms of countability, number, gender and case marking (genitive/partitive). Existentiality is taken up by Dobrovie-Sorin who proposes that nominals introduced by du/de la/des in French denote weak existential quantifiers when they are arguments, in contrast to bare nouns which are always property-denoting. In their contribution, Martin, Carvalho and Alexiadou analyze the individual-denoting bare nominals in subject position they are investigating as non-overt semantic structures of events and provide a detailed semantic account of Brazilian Portuguese and French data.
All papers further address, to different degrees, various facets of the distribution of nominals with a “partitive article” and/or bare nouns in the sentence: for instance, the ban on preverbal subjects introduced by “partitive articles”, in a broad sense, in Francoprovençal (Stark and Gerards); the (in)dependence of nominals with a partitive marker from quantifying expressions (Strobel and Glaser); the grammaticality of complements headed by a plural “partitive article” in telic eventualities (Ihsane); the obligatoriness of partitive markers in particular contexts vs. their optionality in others (Strobel and Glaser; Giusti); the grammaticality of bare nouns as subjects of pancake sentences (Martin, Carvalho and Alexiadou); and the (im)possibility for nominals with a “partitive article” to take narrow scope with regard to the sentential negation, in contrast to bare nouns which always take narrow scope with regard to this operator (Dobrovie-Sorin). More precisely, in their detailed scrutiny of Francoprovençal data, Stark and Gerards examine eleven contexts in which “partitive articles” occur in French in order to determine whether the two languages are alike: among the constructions examined figure most of the ones listed above, but also sentences with a stage-level predicate, presentative contexts, complements of a preposition, and specificity inducing constructions. To account for the distribution of bare nouns and of nominals headed by a “partitive article”, Schurr takes into account other aspects of nominal determination, in particular Differential Object Marking and the clitic system of the languages studied and offers a synchronic analysis of 22 languages from all sub-branches of Romance, as well as a diachronic study, in a usage-based account. As for Gerards and Stark, they propose that “partitive articles” did not exist at all in (Old) Spanish.
Several papers of the volume examine the position of “partitive articles” inside the nominal structure of the constituents containing them: Gerards and Stark postulate a Division Phrase hosting the de component of the “partitive article” and signalling non-individuation; Dobrovie-Sorin proposes that this de is similar to the one in pseudo-partitives, modulo the presence of interpretable number features and concord gender features, and that it sits in the head of a Measure Phrase, dominated by a Determiner Phrase containing a null Determiner Ø∃ (vs. bare nouns, which are nPs). As for Giusti, she assumes that di, which is the counterpart of the French de in Italian and Italo-Romance, is located in Spec,DP, and that the Determiner head can have an overt realization of nominal gender and number features (formally the grammaticalized definite article) or a covert realization of these features. Finally, intriguing agreement patterns in gender and number with subject bare nouns are analyzed in Martin, Carvalho and Alexiadou’s contribution.
Diachronic issues, such as grammaticalization, classification and the evolution in the use of “partitive articles” and markers, are examined by Strobel and Glaser (Germanic), Schurr (Romance), and Gerards and Stark (Spanish).
The languages covered by the contributions of the volume range from Germanic to Romance languages. Although it is not surprising that the latter family of languages is the most represented in the volume, since “partitive articles” are mostly attested in Romance languages, the inclusion of Germanic languages in connection to partitive markers is noteworthy. Many languages discussed in the volume are Standard Languages, like Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Romanian, but others are dialectal and regional varieties. Importantly, several articles describe and analyze languages/varieties that are less studied, including endangered ones: Francoprovençal, Walliser and Walser German, Luxembourgish, and dialectal Italian. Several papers are based on data recently gathered in fieldwork/questionnaires (Giusti; Stark and Gerards; Strobel and Glaser), and/or from corpora (Giusti; Gerards and Stark; Schurr), which is also noteworthy.
The above description of the topics covered in this volume demonstrates the richness and the diversity of the contributions collected. A summary of each article, offering a more detailed and precise picture, is provided in the next section.
5 Summaries of the Contributions
The first three papers of the volume (Chapters 2–4) present a strong diachronic perspective on Germanic languages, on Romance languages, and more specifically on Spanish, respectively. In their paper The Rise and Fall of Partitive Markers in Some Germanic Varieties, Strobel and Glaser provide a comparative analysis of “partitive markers” in the Germanic noun phrase, in a diachronic and a diatopic perspective. They study the genitive case, whose function in older Germanic was to mark (pseudo-)partitivity, and the independent partitive genitive, frequent in Old and Middle High German. The possibilities to express part-whole relations decreased with the loss of the genitive case. However, as the authors show, several modern varieties of Continental West Germanic still have remnants of this use of genitive forms. Others developed new markers or reuse some forms like the preposition von/van ‘from, of’ (see Dutch and Southern Rhine Franconian). Strobel and Glaser highlight that in many contexts, the Germanic markers pattern with the so-called “partitive article” in Italian and French and raise the question whether this could be due to contact since several varieties they study come from the Germanic-Romance contact zone. The authors investigate the functions and the formation of these structures, also in comparison with bare nouns, and a parallel with the corresponding pronouns.
According to Schurr, the distribution of “partitive articles” and bare nouns can be explained on formal grounds (Stark 2016) or on functional grounds in a usage-based approach that combines diachronic data with constraints and biases in language change. In his paper entitled Bound To Be? Bare and Partitive-Marked Noun Phrases in Romance Languages and the Emergence of Prominence-Conditioned Patterns, Schurr approaches the bare/partitive distinction as part of a grammatical subsystem of prominence-conditioned classification, including also Differential Object Marking (Bossong 1982; Körner 1981) and certain clitic patterns. Using a family-level synchronic typology and a diachronic corpus study of their grammaticalization in Medieval Spanish and French, he proposes that early variation in the frequency of clitics attests to ongoing grammaticalization processes, some of which concern prominence-conditioned patterns in the history of Romance languages. This differentiation, in turn, may have contributed to the current distribution of bare and partitive as similar differentiation process shift from clitic to adnominal marking.
Before discussing Old Spanish data, Gerards and Stark propose, in their article Why “Partitive Articles” Do Not Exist in (Old) Spanish, a formal morphosyntactic analysis of “partitive articles” found in several Romance varieties. They argue that “partitive articles” are, in the singular, mass classifiers hosted in the head Div° (cf. Borer 2005) and that they signal non-individuation. They build their analysis on the observation that explicit “dividers”, such as unambiguous overt plural morphemes, and the de-element contained in “partitive articles” are in complementary distribution. The authors test the prediction arising from their account, namely that “partitive articles” are not available in Romance varieties with (unambiguous) overt nominal plural marking, against Old Spanish data, which has unambiguous sigmatic nominal plural morphology and for which the availability of mass classifiers like the “partitive article” has been repeatedly claimed. Gerards and Stark refute this claim and show that what seem to be attestations of “partitive articles” are Quantifier Phrases with zero Q° containing a prepositional phrase, which shows that the prediction of their formal analysis is borne out for (historical) Ibero-Romance data.
Chapter 5, Predicates of Personal Taste and Pancake Sentences in Brazilian Portuguese and French by Martin, Carvalho and Alexiadou, focuses on two different Romance languages and provides as sharp semantic analysis of bare nouns functioning as subjects but interpreted as an event type. The perspective offered by this work complements the one in Chapter 3, which compares bare nouns and partitive-marked nominals in a usage-based approach, the one in Chapter 6, which compares bare nouns and nominals with a “partitive article” in French, also with a strong semantic focus, and the one in Chapter 2 on Germanic languages/varieties in which subjects with genitive case often correspond to bare nouns in English. In their paper, Martin, Carvalho and Alexiadou explore so-called pancake sentences, that is, copular sentences built with a (post-copular) adjective, in French and Brazilian Portuguese. In such sentences, the subject, generally a bare noun in Brazilian Portuguese, is reinterpreted as an event type involving the original referent, and there is agreement mismatch between this subject and the adjective (Greenberg 2008). The authors show that the exact output of the reinterpretation mechanism depends on the building blocks of a non-agreeing copular sentence, which are not identical in French and Brazilian Portuguese. Their analysis accounts for the ambiguity of French non-agreeing copular sentences, and, therefore for the fact that they are not necessarily pancake sentences.
In her article Negation, des-Indefinites in French and Bare Nouns across Languages, Dobrovie-Sorin focuses on an important difference between bare nouns and French indefinites headed by des/de la/du, namely their distribution with regard to Negation and narrow scope: des/de la/du are banned in this context (the invariable de is required), whereas all bare nouns are always necessarily narrow-scoped. This includes bare plurals/bare mass nouns, on the one hand, and bare singulars, on the other hand, although the former and the latter are generally considered different both syntactically and semantically (Dobrovie-Sorin et al. 2005; Espinal and McNally 2007). The author therefore argues that all bare nouns can be analyzed as lacking some functional layers and, correlatively, be property-denoting expressions that can combine with the main predicate via Predicate Modification. As a result, bare nouns are insensitive to Negation. The French des/de la/du indefinites, on the other hand, are argued to be unable to denote properties when they occur in argument positions and therefore unable to form a complex predicate with the verb. Argumental des/de la/du indefinites are analyzed as weak existential quantifiers, which conflicts with a negated existential quantifier over events.
Dobrovie-Sorin’s paper is followed by three chapters (Chapters 7–9) with a strong emphasis on the distribution of noun phrases with a “partitive article”. Chapter 7 investigates French data little discussed in the literature, namely, telic sentences with a complement headed by a “partitive article” in the plural. Chapter 8 has an ambitious agenda, namely the description and analysis of noun phrases with weak indefinite determiners, including “partitive articles”, in Italian and Italo-Romance, in a pan-European perspective. This chapter is followed by a more descriptive one on “partitive articles” in a broad sense in the Francoprovençal variety spoken in the Aosta Valley in Italy (Chapter 9), an important contribution to the understanding of nominal determination in Francoprovençal, an understudied endangered language.
In Chapter 7, entitled Telicity, Specificity and Complements with a “Partitive Article” in French, Ihsane investigates sentences with a des-complement (i.e. introduced by a “partitive article” in the plural) and discusses the impact of this complement on the telicity of the situation. In principle, des-complements occur in atelic sentences, but Ihsane provides and analyzes some data where they are possible in telic situations. To explain the grammaticality of such sentences, she examines various semantic properties of these complements which could play a role in the telic interpretation, such as the presence/absence of an implicit quantity expression in the complement, their type of reference (quantized vs. cumulative; individuated) and specificity. What she proposes is that the des-complements found in telic situations involve a quantity that is known and that this “knowledge” can be formalized in terms of specificity (epistemic specificity). More precisely, the author shows that the referent of such specific indefinites can be identified via “referential anchoring” (see Von Heusinger 2002a, 2002b, 2011).
In the paper A Protocol for Indefinite Determiners in Italian and Italo-Romance, Giusti focuses on weak indefinite nominals in Italian and Italo-Romance varieties, presents the rich variation found across these varieties and claims that they display a robust use of the definite article with indefinite interpretation, unlike many other Romance varieties. Giusti identifies several syntactic and semantic contexts allowing the differentiation between indefinite nominals and kind referring ones (also headed by the definite article in all Romance languages). She provides diagnostics, structured in “protocols”, to capture the dimensions of variation and optionality among five different indefinite determiners, including the so-called “partitive article” and the zero article of bare nouns. More precisely, the author provides a theory neutral way to structure research questions, design a questionnaire, present and analyze empirical results, used in pilot running study on informal Italian and dialectal data whose results help to determine the distribution of the indefinite determiners i) in modern Italian dialects in contact with Standard Italian and ii) in regional varieties of modern Italian in contact with the local dialects.
The last paper of the volume, “Partitive Articles” in Aosta Valley Francoprovençal–Old Questions and New Data, by Stark and Gerards, presents new data on so-called “partitive articles” in the Francoprovençal variety of the Aosta Valley (Italy), collected in fieldwork carried out in May 2017. The data show that in various contexts such as after quantifiers and under the scope of negation, the informants use a highly grammaticalized invariable de-element in front of indefinite mass singular and plural nominals. The authors show that the distribution of this element is more similar to the distribution of the “partitive article” in Standard French than to the one in Standard Italian. However, they also highlight some important differences with French, in particular an overall ban on preverbal subjects introduced by de. As for other differences observed by the authors, such as the attestation, in the data, of fully-fledged (vs. grammaticalized de) “partitive articles” in the singular (contra Kristol 2014), and their preservation under the scope of negation, will need to be further investigated.
6 Conclusion
This volume focuses on different aspects of the distribution, semantics, and internal structure of nominal constituents with a “partitive article” in its indefinite interpretation and of the potentially corresponding bare nouns. It further deals with diachronic issues, such as grammaticalization and evolution in the use of “partitive articles”. The outcome is a snapshot of current research into “partitive articles” and the way they relate to bare nouns, in a cross-linguistic perspective and on new data: the research covers noteworthy data (fieldwork data and corpora) from Standard languages—like French and Italian, but also German—to dialectal and regional varieties, including endangered ones like Francoprovençal.
The research presented here stems from the SLE (Societas Linguistica Europaea) workshop Bare nouns vs. ‘partitive articles’: Disentangling functions held at the University of Zurich in September 2017, organized by Tabea Ihsane and Elisabeth Stark, and funded by the University Research Priority Program Language and Space (
Acknowledgements
This volume could not have been realized without the contribution of many. In particular, I would like to thank the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and the URPP Language and Space (University of Zurich) for financial support, the audience of the above-mentioned SLE workshop for their questions and remarks, the authors for their careful writing and revision, the reviewers for their detailed and constructive comments, and, of course, the publisher for having enthusiastically accepted the proposal for this volume. I am particularly grateful to Elisa Perotti, Keir Moulton, and Stephanie Paalvast for their advice and assistance. My thanks also go to Jana Müller for her help with the proof-reading process. Last but not least, I would like to express my gratitude to Elisabeth Stark for her encouragement and support from day one of this adventure.
Although the term/spelling Franco-Provençal is generally adopted in academic research, we will use Francoprovençal: indeed, the hyphened Franco-Provençal is misleading because is suggests that this language variety is a mixture of French and ‘Provençal’, which is not correct (Kristol 2016).
References
Benincá, Paola. 1980. “Nomi senza articolo.” Rivista di Grammatica Generativa 5; 51–63.
Borer, Hagit. 2005. In Name Only. Structuring Sense, vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bossong, Georg. 1982. “Historische Sprachwissenschaft und empirische Universalienforschung.” Romanistisches Jahrbuch 33, no. 35: 17–51.
Bosveld-de Smet, Leonie. 1998. On mass and plural quantification: the case of French des/du-NPs. PhD Diss., Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, Universiteit van Amsterdam.
Bosveld-de Smet, Leonie. 2004. “Towards a uniform characterization of noun phrases with des or du.” In Handbook of French Semantics, edited by Francis Corblin and Henriëtte De Swart, 41–54. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Cardinaletti, Anna, and Giuliana Giusti. 2006. “The Syntax of Quantified Phrases and Quantitative Clitics.” In Blackwell Companion to Syntax, edited by Martin Everaert and Henk Van Riemsdijk, vol. 5, 23–93. Oxford: Blackwell. doi: 10.1002/9780470996591.ch71.
Cardinaletti, Anna, and Giuliana Giusti. 2016. “The Syntax of the Italian Determiner dei.” Lingua 181: 58–80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2016.05.001.
Cardinaletti, Anna, and Giuliana Giusti. 2018. “Indefinite Determiners: Variation and Optionality in Italo-Romance.” In Advances in Italian Dialectology, edited by Diego Pescarini and Roberta D’Alessandro, 135–161. Language and Linguistics EBooks Online. doi: 10.1163/9789004354395_008.
Cardinaletti, Anna, and Giuliana Giusti. 2020. “Indefinite determiners in informal Italian. A preliminary analysis.” In Shades of Partitivity: formal and areal properties, edited by Tabea Ihsane and Elisabeth Stark. Special Issue in Linguistics 58, no. 3: 679–712.
Carlier, Anne. 2016. “The capricious evolution of the indefinite plural article uns and its relationship with lexical plurality in medieval French.” Lingvisticae Investigationes 39, no. 2: 309–334.
Carlier, Anne, and Béatrice Lamiroy. 2014. “The Grammaticalization of the Prepositional Partitive in Romance.” In Partitive Cases and Related Categories, edited by Silvia Luraghi and Tuomas Huumo, 477–520. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Carlson, Greg N. 1977. “A unified analysis of the English bare plural.” Linguistics and philosophy 1, no. 3: 413–457. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00353456.
Chierchia, Gennaro. 1998. “Reference to kinds across language.” Natural language semantics 6, no. 4: 339–405. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008324218506.
Delfitto, Denis, and Gaetano Fiorin. 2017. “Bare nouns.” In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, 2nd Edition, 1–49. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118358733.wbsyncom097
Dobrovie-Sorin, Carmen. 1997a. “Existential arguments and existential predicates.” In Proceedings of SALT VII, edited by Aaron Lawson, 117–134. Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications.
Dobrovie-Sorin, Carmen. 1997b. “Classes de prédicats, distribution des indéfinis et la distinction thétique-catégorique.” Le gré des langues 58–97.
Dobrovie-Sorin, Carmen, and Claire Beyssade. 2004. Définir les indéfinis. Paris: CNRS Éditions.
Dobrovie-Sorin, Carmen, and Claire Beyssade. 2012. Redefining Indefinites. Dordrecht: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3002-1.
Dobrovie-Sorin, Carmen, Tonia Bleam, and Maria Teresa Espinal. 2005. “Noms nus, nombre et types d’ incorporation.” In Noms nus et généricité, edited by Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin, Claire Beyssade, Georges Kleiber and Henriëtte De Swart, 129–157. PU Vincennes.
Englebert, Annick. 1992. Le “petit mot” DE. Étude de sémantique historique. Geneva: Droz.
Espinal, Maria-Teresa, and Louise McNally. 2007. “Bare singular nominals and incorporating verbs.” In Proceedings of the III NEREUS International Workshop. Definiteness, Specificity and Animacy in Ibero-Romance languages, edited by Georg Kaiser and Manuel Leonetti, 45–62 (Arbeitspapier 122). Konstanz: Universität Konstanz.
Glaser, Elvira. 1993. “Syntaktische Strategien zum Ausdruck von Indefinitheit und Partitivität im Deutschen (Standardsprache und Dialekt).” In Dialektsyntax, edited by Werner Abraham and Josef Bayer, 99–116. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.
Greenberg, Yael. 2008. “Predication and equation in Hebrew (non-pseudocleft) copular sentences.” In Current issues in generative Hebrew linguistics, edited by Sharon Armon-Lotem, Gabi Danon and Susan Rothstein, 161–196. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Guéron, Jacqueline. 2006. “Generic Sentences and Bare Plurals.” In Non-definiteness and plurality, edited by Svetlana Vogeleer and Liliane Tasmowski, 219–234. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/la.95.11gue.
Ihsane, Tabea. 2008. The Layered DP in French. Form and Meaning of French Indefinites. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Ihsane, Tabea. 2018. “Preverbal Subjects with a partitive article: The case of Francoprovençal in the Aosta Valley.” Talk given at SLE 51, Workshop Preverbal Indefinite Subjects, Estonia: Tallinn University.
Kabatek, Johannes, and Albert Wall, eds. 2013. New Perspectives on Bare Noun Phrases in Romance and Beyond [Studies in Language Companion Series 141]. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.141.
Körner, Karl-Hermann. 1981. “ ‘Teilungsartikel’ im Französischen und ‘präpositionaler Akkusativ’ im Spanischen. Komplementäre Lösungen des gleichen syntaktischen Problems.” In Sprache: Formen und Strukturen. Akten des 15 Ling. Koll., 151–160. Thübingen.
Kristol, Andres. 2014. “Les grammaires du francoprovençal: l’ expression de la partitivité. Quelques leçons du projet ALAVAL.” In Actes de la Conférence annuelle sur l’ activité scientifique du Centre d’ études francoprovençales “René Willien”, 29–44. Saint-Nicolas (Aoste).
Kristol, Andres. 2016. “Francoprovençal.” In The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages, edited by Adam Ledgeway and Martin Maiden, 350–362. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kupferman, Lucien. 1979. “L’ article partitif existe-t-il?” Le français moderne 47: 1–16.
Kupferman, Lucien. 1994. “Du: un autre indéfini?” Faits de Langue 4: 195–203. https://doi.org/10.3406/flang.1994.958.
Laca, Brenda. 1996. “Acerca de la semántica de los ‘plurales escuetos’ del Español.” In El sustantivo sin determinación. La ausencia de determinación en la lengua Española, edited by Ignacio Bosque, 241–268. Madrid: Visor Libros.
Le Bruyn, Bert. 2007. “The Partitive Article dei in Italian.” Linguistics in the Netherlands 24: 138–149. https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.24.14bru.
Longobardi, Giuseppe. 1994. “Reference and proper names: A theory of N-Movement in syntax and Logical Form.” Linguistic Inquiry 25: 609–665.
McNally, Louise. 2004. “Bare plurals in Spanish are interpreted as properties.” Catalan Journal of Linguistics 3: 115–133.
Roig, Audrey. 2013. “Des N et du N sujets: Des Généricités toujours refusées?” Travaux De Linguistique: Revue Internationale De Linguistique Française 67: 61–89.
Roodenburg, Jasper. 2004. “French Bare Arguments Are Not Extinct: The Case of Coordinated Bare Nouns.” Linguistic Inquiry 35: 301–313.
Stark, Elisabeth. 2007. “Gender, Number, and Indefinite Articles. About the ‘Typological Inconsistency’ of Italian.” In Nominal Determination. Typology, Context Constraints, and Historical Emergence, edited by Elisabeth Stark, Werner Abraham and Elisabeth Leiss, 49–71. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Stark, Elisabeth. 2008a. “Typological Correlations in Nominal Determination in Romance.” In Essays on Nominal Determination. From Morphology to Discourse Management, edited by Henrik Høeg Müller and Alex Klinge, 45–61. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Stark, Elisabeth. 2008b. “The Role of the Plural System in Romance.” In The Paradox of Grammatical Change. Perspectives from Romance, edited by Ulrich Detges and Richard Waltereit, 57–84. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.293.04sta.
Stark, Elisabeth. 2016. “Nominal morphology and Semantics—Where’s Gender (and ‘Partitive Articles’) in Gallo-Romance?” In Proceedings of the VII Nereus International Workshop “Clitic Doubling and other issues of the syntax/semantic interface in Romance DPs”, edited by Susann Fischer and Mario Navarro, Arbeitspapier 128, 131–149. Konstanz: Universität Konstanz Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft.
Storto, Gianluca. 2003. “On the status of the partitive determiner in Italian.” In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2001: Selected Papers from Going Romance 2001, edited by Josep Quer, Jan Schroten, Mauro Scorretti, Petra Sleeman and Els Verheugd, 315–330. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Von Heusinger, Klaus. 2002a. “Specificity and definiteness in sentence and discourse structure.” Journal of Semantics 19; 245–274.
Von Heusinger, Klaus. 2002b. “Relative Specificity.” In Sinn & Bedeutung VI. Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Meeting of the Gesellschaft für Semantik, edited by Katz Graham, Sabine Reinhard and Philip Reuter, 115–131. University of Osnabruck.
Wall, Albert. 2017. Bare nouns in Brazilian Portuguese. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Zamparelli, Roberto. 2008. “Dei ex machina. A Note on Plural/Mass Indefinite Determiners.” Studia Linguistica 62, no. 3: 301–327. doi: 10.1111/j.1467–9582.2008.00149.x.