Indefinite determiners: Why DE can be enough – Insights from Francoprovençal

Abstract The question we tackle in this paper is why some indefinite nominal expressions are licit in Romance despite the absence of number marking on the determiner and on the noun, an unexpected option in Romance languages, which are number marking languages (Gil 1987). We focus on the invariable DE found in some Francoprovençal varieties and compare it with partitive articles (PAs) in French/Francoprovençal. We propose that invariable DE and the DE component of PAs explicitly express semantic number, more precisely cumulative reference, and that DE can hence satisfy the requirement of D° to encode number/quantification information (following Delfitto & Schroten 1991). DE combines with an overt or covert ILLE component in a separate functional head (Num°/#°; morphosyntactic number), resulting in PAs and bimorphemic-DE, respectively. As a result, DE is semantically and morphologically equivalent to PAs, except for a non-overt component with DE. Our analysis further shows that the mass/count distinction is not morphologically encoded in Romance but rather a byproduct of the two oppositions plural/singular (morphosyntactic number) and cumulative/atomic reference (semantic number).