A Protocol for Indefinite Determiners in Italian and Italo-Romance

This paper focuses on weak indefinite nominals in Italian and Italo-Romance varieties. It presents the rich variation found across Italo-Romance in a pan-Romance perspective and claims that Italo-Romance displays a robust use of the definite article with indefinite interpretation, unlike many other Romance varieties. The paper provides an overview of different semantic and syntactic contexts in which indefiniteness can be detected and distinguished from reference to kind, which is also expressed by the definite article in all Romance languages. The paper then provides diagnostics to capture the dimensions of variation and optionality among five different indefinite determiners: the so-called “partitive article”, the apparent definite article, the bare preposition di, the zero article of bare nouns, and the grammaticalized adjective “certain”. The diagnostics are structured in a “protocol” fashion, that is, a metatheoretical way to structure research questions, design a questionnaire, present and analyze empirical results, abstracting from theory-internal issues. A pilot running of the questionnaire on informal Italian and dialectal data will be presented and analyzed. The results enable us to give a preliminary answer to two general research questions: What is the distribution of the indefinite determiners in modern Italian dialects in contact with Standard Italian? What is the distribution of indefinite determiners in regional varieties of modern Italian in contact with the local dialects?