Three classes of quantity nouns in Italian

Quantity nouns display hybrid functional and lexical behaviour. Based on Italian data, we propose that there are at least three classes of quantity nouns: functional quantity nouns (such as sacco in un sacco di persone ‘a lot of people’), semi-functional quantity nouns (such as dozzina in una dozzina di uova ‘a dozen eggs’), and semi-lexical quantity nouns (such as bottiglia in una bottiglia di vino ‘a bottle of wine’). The three classes occur in a specific hierarchical order directly derived from their positioning in the functional – lexical continuum. We diagnose the three classes by means of co-occurrence with determiners and quantifiers, recursivity, selectional properties, and triggering of past participle agreement when the lexical noun is pronominalized with the clitic ne.