On “partitive dislocation” in Sardinian: A Romance and Minimalist perspective

Abstract

Abstract The traditional philological literature on Sardinian claims that Sardinian has a “partitive object” construction, arguing that it is either inherited from Latin or due to Catalan influence. Under closer examination, however, the construction at issue turns out to be a common Romance clitic right dislocation (CLRD) structure involving the preposition de and a partitive clitic. The article presents the syntactic distribution of this Sardinian construction and its clitic left dislocation (CLLD) counterpart and compares it to similar structures in French, Catalan, and Italian. The result is that the structure appears in all these languages when a bare NP is dislocated, including split-QP/NumP/NP constructions: In all these languages, the dislocated indefinite NP is marked by de/di and a partitive clitic (Sardinian nde, French en, Italian ne, Catalan en/ne) shows up. The article ends with a Minimalist analysis, in which clitics are the spell-out of a probe in v that triggers movement of a complement to the specifier of vP to overcome a phase boundary. In this account, a probe that targets indefinite NPs assigns partitive case, while the probe itself is spelled out as a partitive clitic. While taking Sardinian as a starting point, the article bears on more general issues and unveils a common mechanism in one group of Romance languages.