Living on the Edge. On Bare and Non-Bare NCIs across Italo-Romance

Abstract

This article describes and discusses some properties of the distribution of Negative Concord Items (NCIs) in the Italo-Romance domain, taking into account both varieties of Italian and varieties of other Italo-Romance languages. More precisely, the authors examine non-negative contexts, which allow the presence of NCIs. Across all non-negative contexts, bare/pronominal NCIs are systematically allowed in more contexts than complex ones, modulo the behavior of the specific variety in relation to non-negative contexts. The phenomenon can be accounted for by assuming that the structure of complex and bare NCIs is different not only in terms of null versus lexically realized NPs. The authors argue that bare NCIs, and possibly other quantificational elements, are not paired with a null DP but with a reduced structure, i.e., a classifier-like element which contains no lexical N.