The Status of De in Romance Indefinites, Partitives and Pseudopartitives*

Abstract

This paper focuses on the status of de in Romance indefinites, partitives and pseudopartitives. It argues that there is neither a ‘partitive article’ nor a ‘partitive preposition’ in syntax. De in Romance indefinites is the overt Spell‐Out of an abstract operator de that cancels the definiteness of articles and is responsible for indefiniteness. De in Romance partitives is the overt Spell‐Out of a relator head that takes a definite DP as complement and a QP in the specifier position. Finally, pseudopartitivity is shown to have crosslinguistic parallels with indefinites, and it is derived by postulating a mono‐projectional analysis in which a semilexical N selects for a de‐phrase, in exactly the same way that quantifiers and cardinals select for indefinite de‐phrases.