Indefinite determiners in informal Italian: A preliminary analysis

1.1 The expression of indefiniteness in Italian

In modern Italian, we observe at least six possibilities for plural count nouns, as listed in (1)–(2), all of which mean ‘I would like to buy an indefinite quantity of flowers’. In (1a) we find the quantifier alcuni ‘some’, in (1b) the pseudo-partitive construction un po’ di ‘a bit of’, and in (1c) the cardinal due ‘two’, which does not necessarily convey a proper cardinal meaning. In (2), we observe three indefinite determiners: the zero determiner (henceforth, zero), the definite article used for indefinite meaning (henceforth, art), and the so-called partitive determiner, which has the same morphology as the preposition di ‘of’ incorporating a definite article (henceforth, di+art):

Apart from the quantifier alcuni ‘some’ and the cardinal due ‘two’, the other four forms in (1)–(2) are also found with singular mass nouns, as in (3), which all mean ‘I would like to buy an indefinite quantity of wine’:

Two other possibilities are reported in the literature to express indefiniteness in Italo-Romance varieties with both mass singular and count plural nouns, namely bare di ‘of’ and certo ‘certain’. In Tuscan, bare di is reported to be present only if the nominal expression is modified by a prenominal adjective, like ‘good’ in (4). In the Northwest, bare di is possible more generally (5). The adjective certo appears in (6) with the function of an indefinite determiner in some parts of southern Italy (cf. also Ledgeway 2009):

Bare di is not present in standard Italian, while certo conveys specialized readings such as ‘of a given type’ or ‘with specific reference’, which are most common with plural count nouns (7a), and can be found with both plural and mass nouns in emphatic contexts (7b):

Such richness of possible forms raises the question whether they are all available to all speakers of Italian and, if so, whether they are equivalent or convey different nuances of indefiniteness, as observed for certo above and as proposed for the other indefinite determiners in Italo-Romance varieties by Cardinaletti and Giusti (2018), to be reviewed in the next section.

1.2 A previous study on Italo-romance varieties

There is no literature on how indefinite determiners distribute across Italo-Romance varieties or in regional Italian. In a preliminary study, Cardinaletti and Giusti (2018) address three issues related to this general question. First, they give a provisional account of optionality and semantic specialization of the three forms present in Italian, namely zero, art, and di + art (see (2) and (3b)–(3d)). Then, they analyze a lesser studied central Italian dialect (Anconetano) that only displays two forms (art and di + art) and observe that, in this case, there is no overlap of meaning: one form (art) is the unmarked narrow scope indefinite, the other form (di + art) only has a wide scope, small quantity interpretation. Finally, they provide a detailed survey of the indefinite determiners appearing in three AIS maps (consulted online in Tisato 2009) which can be taken to represent the dialectal variation found at the beginning of the last century. Two maps have an indefinite mass noun (map 1037 [‘if there was water’] and map 1343 [‘go to the cellar to take wine’]), one has an indefinite plural noun (map 636 [‘to look for violets’]). The three maps only present narrow scope interpretation. The detailed analysis of the maps suggested the following observations.

The maps display four forms, namely zero, art, bare di, and di + art. Certo does not appear on the maps with the function of indefinite determiner. Other forms such as ‘a couple of, a bit of’ or the like are sporadic. The distribution of the four forms in the Italian territory at the beginning of the last century displays strong tendencies. Some areas have a preference for one form: the extreme North, especially the Grigioni area in Switzerland, and the extreme South, namely southern Calabria, southern Apulia and Sicily, only display zero; the extreme West, namely Val d’Aosta and western Piedmont at the border with France, only displays bare di; in Emilia–Romagna, di + art is predominant; the Centre–South from southern Tuscany – Marche – Umbria – Lazio down to northern Calabria and northern Apulia only displays art.

In other areas, there are two, sometimes three possible forms. This raises the question of whether these forms are the result of pure optionality or whether each form is associated with a different interpretation. Given that each map displays consistent preferences for one form or the other, Cardinaletti and Giusti (2018) propose that the most common form throughout the three maps in given areas is to be taken as the unmarked form for each area, the other form(s) is/are claimed to convey a specialized meaning. They propose that the item visualized in AIS map 1037 (‘if there was water’) most probably induces a core existential indefinite interpretation; the item visualized in AIS map 1343 (‘go to the cellar to take wine’) induces saliency interpretation of the object wine, as wine is the typical product to be stored in a cellar; the item visualized in AIS map 636 (‘to look for violets’) induces small quantity interpretation of the object violette, as violets are usually collected in small bunches. This is supported by the fact that AIS map 1037 presents a more consistent distribution of a given form in each area, while the other two maps display a higher degree of variation in given areas, as well as in individual points across the maps.

Where art is not the unmarked form (that is, everywhere except the central-southern regions), it conveys a salient referent interpretation. Where di + art is not the unmarked form (that is, everywhere except Emilia Romagna), it conveys a small quantity interpretation. The contexts provided by the three AIS maps are however all compatible with the unmarked meaning as well as with either specialized meaning. The variation found at given points in the AIS maps is therefore compatible with an analysis that complies with general economy principles and assumes that there is no true optionality, but different forms are specialized for different meanings.

Finally, Cardinaletti and Giusti (2018) note that even in areas where only one form is given by AIS, there may be other available forms that are found in discourse contexts not represented in the AIS maps. This is the case of Anconetano di + art, which can only appear in wide scope contexts. This is unsurprising as there are no AIS maps reporting indefinite determiners in wide scope contexts.

This state of affairs can be analyzed along the lines of Bartoli’s (1925) Lateral Areas, according to which innovations spread from the centre towards the periphery of a given area, losing their effectiveness while reaching the borders. In our case, the ancient form, perpetuating the Latin lack of article in all nominal expressions, is zero. Zero proves to be resilient in indefinite expressions at the borders of the Italo-Romance area (the extreme North, and the extreme South), while the new formation (art) has spread in the Center as the “prototypical” article even in indefinite expressions. Bare di is a Gallo-Romance innovation, only present in the extreme Northwest, at the border with France from which it has spread. Interestingly, di + art is found in an area spreading in the West–East direction, at the crossroad with the North–South direction of the spreading of art.

1.3 Research questions

Cardinaletti and Giusti’s (2018) observations are based on a limited set of data. The AIS maps only provide indefinites with narrow scope interpretation; only very rarely do they report optionality even if it was supposedly present. They represent the situation at the beginning of the last century. This situation has certainly changed considerably in contact with Italian, which is nowadays the L1 of the greatest majority of speakers (cf. ISTAT 2012). Furthermore, Cardinaletti and Giusti’s (2018) analysis of present-day informal Italian and Anconetano is based on native judgments of the authors and few other speakers, as is typical of generative grammarians, and does not represent possible regional variation, which is supposedly present.

In these respects, a number of issues arise:

1. Has the use of indefinite determiners in Italo-Romance changed in the last century, especially considering the increasingly stronger dominance of Italian?

2. If so, to what extent and in what directions with respect to possible forms and their possible interpretation?

3. Is there variation among regional varieties of informal Italian in the possible forms of indefinite determiners and their interpretation?

4. If so, does such variation reflect the original properties reported by AIS and discussed by Cardinaletti and Giusti (2018)?

To our knowledge, these issues have never been addressed up to now.

The first two questions could only be answered through a thorough search on local dialects. This will be the object of a large project of data collection, which is at its very initial stage. The form and distribution of indefinite determiners in modern Italo-Romance varieties will therefore not be touched upon in this paper.

To start answering the last two questions, an online questionnaire was designed to detect the distribution and the optional use in informal Italian of the five indefinite determiners mentioned in Section 1.1; namely, zero, art, bare di, di + art, certo. The different items of the questionnaire permit to have an overview of the distribution of indefinite determiners according to the traits individuated by Cardinaletti and Giusti (2018):

For space reasons, we limit our discussion here to six items of the questionnaire which only allow narrow scope interpretation. We therefore do not expect differences between singular mass and plural count nouns due to scope properties, but only related to the other traits (type of sentence and specialization of meaning).

2.1 The questionnaire on the expression of indefiniteness

The questionnaire on indefiniteness is made of 25 items organized as follows:

1. 9 multiple choice items with indefinite direct objects (singular mass vs. count plural), with different tense/aspect/polarity, in different pragmatic contexts.

2. 2 substitution tasks, i. e., open questions asking to substitute a singular mass noun with a plural count noun.

3. 6 open comments on possible differences in interpretation, in case more than one possible choice has been provided.

4. 4 multiple choice items for pragmatically coherent sentences, in which the participant is asked to judge coherence of statements with a follow-up causative clause.

5. 3 open questions on the linguistic attitude of the participant (confidence on their judgments, their normative/descriptive attitude, their personal appreciation of the experience of completing the task).

6. 1 consent item.

The questionnaire presents the items in a fixed order and does not include fillers. This makes the questionnaire as short and accessible as possible, allowing the participants to “warm up” with the shorter/simpler sentences and avoiding the risk that they would get tired towards the end, when the tasks are more complex. At a first screening, the results do not display any priming effect, as we observe different answers in subsequent items by individual informants. However, a more precise calculation of this is needed, something which we postpone to future work.

In this paper, we analyze the following six items of the initial part of the questionnaire. Items (i)–(iv) are negative statements. This assures narrow scope interpretation of the object, which is the core interpretation of indefinites (opposed to the interpretations arising in subject position and in non-negative contexts, e. g., specific, D-linked, ^[3] etc.). We compare mass nouns in (i) and (iii) with plural count nouns in (ii) and (iv) in order to check whether they behave in the same fashion, as usually assumed in the literature. The items on mass nouns (i), (iii) are multiple choice questions. The items on count nouns are substitution tasks (ii), (iv): ^[4]

Items (v) and (vi) allow us to contrast negative sentences with non-negative episodic sentences in the past. Since we are focussing on narrow scope indefinites, we are only using mass nouns here in order to isolate narrow scope interpretation from the wide scope interpretation which is more easily available with plural count nouns (cf. Cardinaletti and Giusti 2016):

2.2 Participants

The questionnaire was taken by 92 participants out of the 540 enrolled in the MOOC. Ten of them were not L1 Italian and have been discarded for the purposes of the present research. The remaining 82 participants all declared to have native competence of Italian. Slightly more than half (47) declared Italian as their dominant language; another large group (30) declared to have Italian as L1 but to be competent in the dialect of the town of origin or in other dialects; only few (5) declared to use the dialect of the town of origin as L1, still having full competence of Italian. This variable appears to be evenly distributed in the whole sample. ^[5] The age groups are also rather balanced: 18–30 (20 participants); 30–40 (15 participants); 40–50 (26 participants); 50–60 (19 participants); >60 (2 participants).

All participants were asked to describe their linguistic profile (see above the introduction to this section) resulting in the following distribution across the regions of Italy. In two cases, the towns of origin and residence did not coincide; these two participants are counted here according to the variety of informal Italian they declared to speak, which corresponds to the town of origin:

1. Northwest (11): Piedmont (4), Lombardy (6), Liguria (1)

2. Northeast (21): Veneto (19), Friuli Venezia Giulia (2)

3. Emilia Romagna (6)

4. Centre (10): Toscana (2), Marche (2), Lazio (6)

5. South (20): Abruzzo (4), Campania (4), Puglia (8), Calabria (4)

6. Sardinia (5)

7. Sicily (9)

The sample is admittedly not optimally balanced as regards the areal distribution of the participants. This is due to the fact that enrolment to the MOOC and completion of each questionnaire was voluntary. It does however provide a perspective on the whole country.

In order to have groups with some quantitative relevance, we aggregated the participants in geographical macro-areas, which roughly correspond to Cardinaletti and Giusti’s (2018) findings on the AIS maps. The results we obtained confirm the separation of Emilia Romagna from the rest of northern Italian and of the two islands from the other areas of the South. The Centre is heterogeneous with respect to the traditional classification of Italo-Romance varieties, as pointed out by a reviewer. This is because it includes Tuscany, which is usually considered as separate from the “area mediana”, and the Marches, ^[6] part of which are in the “area perimediana” (cf. Loporcaro and Paciaroni 2016). However, the data we obtained characterize it as the buffer area between Emilia-Romagna and the South, thereby contributing to obtain a coherent representation of the diatopic distribution of indefinite determiners.

2.3 Types of answers

As the questionnaire allowed multiple selections, we first coded the results for the number of choices (1–5) of each participant.

Out of 490 answers, we find 209 one-choice answers (42%), 219 two-choice answers (45%), 54 three-choice answers (11%), 8 four-choice answers (2%). (Multiple choice answers are thus 281 [57%] in total). ^[7] No item in the questionnaire received a five-choice answer.

The one-choice and the two-choice answers are basically restricted to zero and art, and few occurrences of di + art in items (v)–(vi). Certo occurs most of the time in three/four-choice answers. Three/four-choice answers are almost absent in items (i)–(iv) and are found more often in items (v)–(vi).

If we consider the rate of selection of each of the five forms irrespectively of whether they appear as one or multiple choice answers, zero and art are the most frequent forms. Their overall occurrence is 410 and 307, respectively. Bare di appears in one isolated case, as 1 out of 4 possibilities, and was used in a sentence provided in the Sicilian dialect; this occurrence was not counted (see Note 9). Di + art occurs 92 times and certo 28 times. Note that the fact that zero and art are chosen in the highest percentages is not to be attributed to them being the first and the second possible choices in the list. In fact, di + art and certo, the fourth and fifth possible choices in the list, were selected much more frequently than bare di, the third in the list, which was never chosen.

In Section 3, we present the different distribution of the participants’ choices in the six items of the questionnaire analyzed here.

3.1 Mass nouns in negative contexts

3.2 Plural count nouns in negative contexts

These two items are the result of open question tasks. Participants were asked to provide new sentences substituting potatoes for meat (cf. item [ii]) and spirits for wine (cf. item [iv]). As said in Note 7 above, one participant from the South missed to fill in these two items.

3.3 Mass nouns in episodic sentences in the past

3.4 Summary of the data

To better grasp the distribution of each form throughout contexts and areas, we summarize the overall occurrences of the four determiners in Tables 13–16, each giving a synopsis of the behaviour of each determiner. In Tables 13 and 14, it is evident that zero and art are present everywhere. Table 15 shows that di + art is basically limited to episodic sentences in the past and appears mostly in the North and the Centre, while Table 16 shows that certo is limited to few occurrences, which mostly appear in the North and in Sardinia.

4.1 The distribution of indefinite forms across contexts

The mass singular vs. plural count distinction, which in the items discussed here can only be checked in negative sentences in the present, does not have great impact on the choice among the different determiner forms.

1. Zero is prevalent with both mass singular and plural count nouns.

2. Art is also very common with both. This is clear comparing wine and spirits in negative sentences. Meat and potatoes apparently behave differently from one another, but this may be due to reasons related to saliency. ^[11]

3. Di + art has the same occurrence with mass singular and plural count nouns.

4. Certo is more frequent with plural count nouns. This is expected if the type of meaning conveyed by certo arises more easily with plural count nouns, as noted in (7) above.

The comparison between negative sentences in the present tense vs. episodic sentences in the past displays some differences:

1. We find a much larger occurrence of di + art in episodic sentences as opposed to its quasi total lack in negative sentences. This can be reduced to the small quantity interpretation that is more readily available in episodic sentences, especially with ‘wine’ (which is drunk in small quantity).

2. zero and art are possible in both contexts with the higher occurrence of zero, as is generally the case in all contexts.

3. Certo is very rare in both contexts. It appears to be slightly preferred in episodic sentences in the past, but only with ‘wine’. This can be reduced to the specialization of certo as referring to types, as mentioned in (7) above, and to the fact that types of wine are contextually more relevant to cultural discourse than types of meat.

4.2 The diatopic distribution of indefinite forms compared to AIS

While the AIS maps only present zero, art, bare di, and di + art and do not attest certo, our data of present-day informal Italian present some occurrences of certo and do not display any bare di (although two informants come from the province of Turin, where the three AIS maps reported a consistent use of bare di). As for the lack of bare di in our data, two hypotheses can be formulated: either this form has never entered informal Italian, or the low number of speakers from the Northwest has not allowed this form to emerge in our questionnaire.

If we compare the diatopic distribution of the determiner forms in present-day informal Italian and the AIS maps, we observe a different picture.

1. As shown in Table 13, zero is the unmarked form in all indefinite contexts and all over the country. Its distribution is thus much wider in present-day informal Italian than what is represented in the Italo-Romance varieties depicted in the three AIS maps. It should however be observed that in our contemporary Italian data, zero appears in higher percentages in those areas where it appears to be the unmarked form in the last-century dialects, namely the Northeast and Sicily.

2. As shown in Table 14, art has gained ground with respect to the situation attested in AIS; in present-day informal Italian, it is widespread all over the country, although it is chosen less frequently than zero. Interestingly, art is still a prominent form in the (Centre-) South, where it was reported to be the only form in AIS.

3. As shown in Table 15, di + art does not have an unmarked indefinite meaning in present-day informal Italian, not even in Emilia Romagna, where it is reported to be the unmarked form in the AIS maps. According to our data, in the informal Italian variety of Emilia Romagna, zero and art are the most frequent forms, in apparent free variation; di + art is however attested more than in other areas in all contexts. This singles out Emilia Romagna from the rest of Italy, where di + art is present in considerable percentages only in episodic sentences, especially in the North and the Centre, less so in the South and the islands.

4. Table 16 cannot be directly compared to AIS data, since certo does not appear in the three relevant maps. However, the fact that it appears to be evenly distributed across the country, only as one of more choices, lets us infer that neither in the dialects, nor in present-day informal Italian, certo can be used as the unmarked indefinite determiner.

4.3 The optionality issue

The AIS maps only sporadically report more than one form at given points of the map but can be taken to witness optionality in given areas, in the sense that variation is found in neighbouring points. When variation regards the same area in the three AIS maps, Cardinaletti and Giusti (2018) reduce it to different nuances of indefinite meaning, claiming that at least in the Italo-Romance varieties of last century, no true optionality was attested.

Note that the objective of AIS was not to search for optionality in the expression of syntactic forms such as the indefinite determiners, while our questionnaire of informal Italian is especially designed for this, always reminding the participants to tick all of the acceptable choices.

The large occurrence of zero and art in the same contexts and in the same areas suggests optionality between the two forms, with a preference for zero, especially in the Northeast and in Sicily (cf. Tables 13 and 14). A second piece of evidence supporting the hypothesis of optionality between zero and art is the fact that in more than half of the answers (281, 57%), participants chose more than one form. This holds of all areas, except Sicily, where the one-choice answers outnumber the two- or three/four-choice answers in most items.

In some cases, however, specialization of meaning can be said to be at work in the choice between more than one possible forms, which is more apparent in episodic sentences in the past. As observed in Section 4.1, our Italian data confirm the tendencies observed in the AIS maps by Cardinaletti and Giusti (2018); namely, zero is associated with the core indefinite meaning, art with saliency, and di + art with small quantity. This is also confirmed by a first analysis of speakers’ comments on their judgements about item (v), the episodic sentence in the past “Yesterday, for dinner we ate meat”. Among the speakers who have provided more than one choice (47), 10 (spread over the country) claim to find no difference in interpretation, the other 37 observe that while zero expresses “general” indefiniteness, the definite article expresses saliency of the meat with respect to the dinner context (its expected presence in the menu, or a particular type of meat, etc.), di + art implies that the meat is not the only food served for dinner, while certo emphasizes the quality of the meat.