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 indefinites in...

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Bibliographic Details
Author: Eguren Gutiérrez, Luis Javier
Format: article
Publication Date:2025
Country:España
Institution:Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Repository:Biblos-e Archivo. Repositorio Institucional de la UAM
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:dnet:biblosearchi::07925f26163cffa1e450451ca8979a11
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10486/758261
https://dx.doi.org/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
Filología
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