draft of November 2011

nominal is doubled by the pronoun lo, which in this case is non-referential. 10
(21) A:Vorrei un tavolo grande B:Mi spiace. Non lo abbiamo, uno
A:would-like-1sg a
grande
big
table big B:Me displeases-3sg. Not it have-1pl, a
I would like to buy a big table. I’m sorry. We do not have a big one.
(From Alexiadou and Gengel 2008, attributed to V.Samek-Lodovici)
Compare now with the Greek counterpart of (21) in (22). As in Italian, the noun can be
elided, but the adjective alone is enough; there is no element heading the nominal and, in
addition, there is no doubling. All we have is a bare adjective holding the place of a nominal
object.
(22) a. thelo afti ti fusta se kitrino
want-1sg this the skirt in yellow
I would like this skirt in yellow.
b. Distihos dhen eho kitrini. (Mono mavres mu ehun
unfortunately not
mini)
left)
have-1sg yellow-fem.sg (Ony black-fem.pl me have-3pl
Unfortunately I don’t have a yellow one. ( Only black ones are left).
The facts presented in this section are summarised in Table 1. All critical cases involve
non-referential or weak indefinites. The emerging pattern is that for such nominals, Italian
10 Belletti and Rizzi (1981) argue on the basis of the examples below where ne is obligatory and uno un-
grammatical, that ne involves less structure than DP. However, Cardinaletti and Giusti (1990) have argued
against this position and analyse ne as a head Q, although in their paper they do not take an explicit position
on whether Q is a functional category different from D or it is the head of D. In the discussion to come we will
adopt this latter position.
(i) a. ho letto un lunghissimo libro
have-1sg read a very-long book
I have read a very long book.
b. ne/*uno ho letto uno/*un (lunghissimo)
14