draft of November 2011

(66) *den prokite na vri ti yineka pu na tu kani ola ta
not going-to-3sg subj find-3sg the-acc woman that subj him.cl do-3sg all
hatiria
favours
He’s not going to find the woman that will satisfy every whim of his.
the
This set of contrasts can be understood, if, as proposed by Giusti (1993, 1997, 2002, 2010),
the main role of the Italian article is that of a syntactic/grammatical morpheme acting as the
nominalisor of a predicative noun, building a DP argument. By contrast, in Greek the article
appears only when needed for semantic/pragmatic reasons, since Number is the nominalisor,
hence the stronger definite interpretations when the article is involved.
The crosslinguistic contrast also indicates that the more referential/definite interpreta-
tions arise in the language where the nominal has less structure and, indeed, is not a D head,
i.e. Greek. This is expected since the definite article is implicated for interpretation. By con-
trast, in Italian, D is syntactically necessary as the nominalisor, and, therefore, weaker/less
referential readings arise when D is needed as a nominalisor in contexts which are not clearly
definite/referential like (65) or under the de dicto reading of (67) or even the use of lo in the
predicative structures in (68). It is worth pointing out that our view departs from the propos-
als of Longobardi (1994) and Déchaine and Wiltschko (2002) in one crucial respect. What
these two proposals share is that D and referentiality are intrinsically linked. Both analyses
assume a structural ambiguity for articles and pronouns, depending on their interpretation.
For instance, lo under the de dicto reading in (67) and in the predicative structure in (68)
lacks a D layer, and is just a NP. 25 We will discuss these examples in more detail in the next
section.
(67) Gianni sta cercando un idraulico ma non lo trova
Gianni is looking-for a plumber but not him.cl find-3sg
Gianni is looking-for a plumber but cannot find one.
(68) a. Bella la/lo e’
beautiful it.cl is
Beautiful she is.
25 Longobardi pc after related talk of his at Cambridge University, 2011.
37