The syntax of the Italian indefinite determiner dei

This paper provides a syntactic analysis of the indefinite plural determiner dei in Italian, also called 'partitive article', as in Ho visto dei ragazzi (I saw de.art boys). It argues that dei is neither parallel to the inflected preposition dei in: Ho visto alcuni dei ragazzi (I saw some of the boys), nor to the quantifier alcuni in: Ho visto alcuni ragazzi (I saw some boys), contra previous literature. We support a simple DP analysis which takes del as the plural counterpart of the indefinite article un, and claim that dei-nominals do not have a QPstructure, as proposed for quantified nominals in Cardinaletti and Giusti (1992, 2006, in press). We propose that de- is an uninflected determiner in SpecDP, which cooccurs with an overt morpheme (-i) in D, realizing Gender and Number. This accounts for the apparent morphological similarity of this concord morpheme with the definite article, without the need to attribute referential or kind-denoting interpretation to it. The paper also investigates differences and similarities between dei-nominals and bare plurals.