Prenominal possessives with indefinites in Romance

This paper describes and compares the properties of prenominal possessives in indefinite DPs in three Romance varieties: Standard Italian (SI), Girona Catalan (GC), and a so-called "conservative dialect" of European Portuguese (CEP). It is first shown that prenominal possessives with indef...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Eguren, Luis|||0000-0001-9543-292X, Roca, Francesc|||0000-0001-9186-4899
Format: article
Publication Date:2025
Country:España
Institution:Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Repository:Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:ddd.uab.cat:322188
Online Access:https://ddd.uab.cat/record/322188
https://dx.doi.org/urn:doi:10.5565/rev/isogloss.557
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:European portuguese
Evaluative possessives
Girona catalan
Non-evaluative possessives
Prenominal possessives
Standard italian
Strong possessives
Weak possessives
Description
Summary:This paper describes and compares the properties of prenominal possessives in indefinite DPs in three Romance varieties: Standard Italian (SI), Girona Catalan (GC), and a so-called "conservative dialect" of European Portuguese (CEP). It is first shown that prenominal possessives with indefinites in both GC and CEP evaluate the possession relation, indicating that there is a close relation between the possessor and the possessum, whereas prenominal possessives in the SI [Indefinite+Poss+N] construction are (non-evaluative) unmarked possessives. It is also argued that prenominal possessives with indefinites in GC and CEP have the syntactic and semantic properties of strong forms (in Cardinaletti 1998's sense), while prenominal possessives following an indefinite determiner in SI are weak forms. A formal analysis of prenominal possessives with indefinites in the Romance varieties under study which accounts for their particular properties in structural terms is further provided.