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In:The Ziggurat of Grammar: In honor of Ur Shlonsky
Edited by Lena Baunaz, Giuliano Bocci and Andrew Nevins
[Language Faculty and Beyond 20] 2025
► pp. 279–302

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Chapter 14
The cartography of quantity nouns in Italian

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Published online: 13 November 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lfab.20.14car
Abstract
Focusing on Italian, we identify three subclasses of quantity nouns (qNs) on a continuum from functional (e.g. un po’ ‘a bit’, un sacco ‘a lot’, una montagna ‘a mountain’) to semi-functional (e.g. una dozzina ‘a dozen’, un centinaio ‘a hundred’) to semi-lexical (e.g. chilo ‘kilo’, bottiglia ‘bottle’). This classification captures the syntactic and semantic behaviour of qNs, which are nouns with the same selectional properties as quantifiers. Apparent inconsistencies can be captured by the hypothesis that some qNs belong to more than one subclass, including preserving full lexical status. The different properties of the subclasses and their strict ordering, which recalls the order of restructuring verbs in the verbal domain (Cardinaletti and Shlonsky 2004), are derived from their position in the cartographic hierarchy.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Cardinal qNs
    • 2.1Approximate cardinal nouns
    • 2.2A syntactic analysis
  • 3.A typology of qNs
    • 3.1Functional qNs (FqNs)
    • 3.2Semi-lexical qNs (SLqNs)
    • 3.3A third subclass of qNs: Semi-functional qNs (SFqNs)
    • 3.4Interim conclusions
  • 4.Further diagnostics
    • 4.1Ne cliticization
    • 4.2Past participle agreement with ne
    • 4.3Accusative clitic pronouns
    • 4.4Possessives
    • 4.5Subject-verb agreement
  • 5.Categorial ambiguities
  • 6.Co-occurrence and ordering
  • 7.A comparison with the cartography of the clause
  • 8.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (27)
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