Indefinite determiners. Variation and Optionality in Italoromance

In this paper, we concentrate on the most wide-spread forms of indefinite determiners, claiming that they are variants of one and the same syntactic structure. Assuming with Abney (1987) that the highest portion of the nominal structure (DP) includes two positions, a specifier (SpecDP) and a head (D), we take the indefinite operator, which provides the indefinite semantics, to occur in SpecDP, while the head D is specified for the gender and number features of the nominal projection. Both positions may be overt or covert. The indefinite operator can be realized by the uninflected form di, while the head D can be realized by the same form as the definite article. The option of filling either position with an overt or covert element gives 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.