Partitivity in Italian

This paper claims that “partitive” is a cover term for at least four types of syn-tactic constructions and provides diagnostics to distinguish among (i) partitive structures instantiated by a quantifier selecting two arguments: an indefinite nominal expression and a “partitive PP” (cf. Cardinaletti & Giusti 2017)) (ii) quantitative structures instantiated by a quantifier just selecting the indefinite nominal expression; (iii) the so-called “partitive article” (di+art in Italian), which is an indefinite determiner for mass and plural count nouns; (iv) the partitive clitic ne,which only resumes a bare indefinite nominal expression. The paper presents the diagnostics in the “protocol” fashion, a theory-neutral methodol-ogy to present and organize data, encompassing the incommunicability across different approaches. The diagnostics highlight properties that distinguish the four categories from one another and set them in comparison with other cate-gories, such as genitive and oblique PPs; accusative, genitive and oblique clitics and null subject pronouns; circumstantial partitive PPs; bare nouns and pseudo-partitives. This is done in a one-language perspective, focussing on Italian with a close eye on what has been claimed for French, the only other language to display the four phenomena