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Language Change at the Interfaces: Intrasentential and intersentential phenomena
Edited by Nicholas Catasso, Marco Coniglio and Chiara De Bastiani
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 275] 2022
► pp. 95–122

Bare quantifiers and Verb Second

The view from Old Italian

| Goethe University Frankfurt
| Goethe University Frankfurt

The pre-participial syntax of the bare quantifiers tutto ‘everything’, molto ‘much’ and niente ‘nothing’ in Old Italian has been argued to be determined by the optional or obligatory presence of a classifier-like category n° in their internal structures (Poletto 2014; Garzonio & Poletto 2017, 2018). Their ‘upstairs’, i.e. CP syntax, however, does not seem to be sensitive to this distinction. All of these bare QPs are equally subject to the V2 property and can appear before the inflected verb, showing the exact same distributional properties. It will be shown, however, that on the basis of interpretative differences, tutto, molto and niente are not moved to the same projection: molto targets a lower projection in the focus field, we identify as Mod(ifier)P in Rizzi (2004), while tutto and niente target positions for either contrastive or ‘new information’ focus. More generally, this will be shown to follow from the pragmatic nature of the V2 phenomenon in OI.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Tutto, molto and niente in the low IP area
    • 2.1Internal syntax and ‘downstairs’ syntax
    • 2.2Molto inside
  • 3.Bare QPs and V2
  • 4.Fronting of molto is different
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Source Abbreviations and Editions of Texts
  • References
Published online: 21 April 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.275.03ros
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