The non-partitivity of Catalan and Italian nominal ne

Abstract

In this review article we discuss the main arguments in support of the hypothesis that in Contemporary Catalan and Italian nominal ne is neither a prepositional clitic, nor a partitive clitic nor a quantitative clitic. While the item from which Romance ne originates (Latin inde) pronominalized PPs with locative meanings, similarly to what happens with de, following a grammaticalization cline, ne comes to pronominalize different layers of nominal structure, and in contemporary Romance also expresses non-specific indefiniteness. We maintain that, syntactically, whereas partitivity is characterized as being a birelational category that necessarily connects a subset to a maximal superset, the indefinite use of ne is not birelational in the same sense. We support the hypothesis that nominal ne is a property-type anaphora that resumes a non-specific weak indefinite nominal expression. We review a number of syntactic and semantic arguments in support of the non-partitivity of nominal ne in Catalan and Italian, from which we conclude that it is a pro-NP, unmarked for gender and number, whose antecedent cannot have a unique or maximal reference.