The cartography of quantity nouns in Italian

Focusing on Italian, we identify three subclasses of quantity nouns (qNs) on a continuum from functional (e.g. un po’ ‘a bit’, un sacco ‘a lot’, una montagna ‘a mountain’) to semi-functional (e.g. una dozzina ‘a dozen’, un centinaio ‘a hundred’) to semi-lexical (e.g. chilo ‘kilo’, bottiglia ‘bottle’). This classification captures the syntactic and semantic behaviour of qNs, which are nouns with the same selectional properties as quantifiers. Apparent inconsistencies can be captured by the hypothesis that some qNs belong to more than one subclass, including preserving full lexical status. The different properties of the subclasses and their strict ordering, which recalls the order of restructuring verbs in the verbal domain (Cardinaletti and Shlonsky 2004), are derived from their position in the cartographic hierarchy.