Partitive objects in negative contexts in Northern Italian Dialects

Abstract

Abstract In this article we analyze partitive objects under negation (NPOs) in the Northern Italian dialectal (NID) domain and discuss their diachronic and synchronic relation with both partitive constructions and partitive articles. We take into exam the areal distribution of the phenomenon, its syntactic variation and the different factors that regulate this variation. The main claim of the paper is that NPOs in the NIDs are a special type of grammaticalized partitive constructions, where negation licenses a silent quantifier and the preposition expresses extraction from a ‘whole’. In other words, the development of NPOs is similar to that of partitive articles, but they have not lost the partitive meaning. This explains why they appear only with plurals and singular mass nouns.