Prenominal possessives with indefinites in Romance

This paper describes and compares the properties of prenominal possessives in indefinite DPs in three Romance varieties: Standard Italian (SI), Girona Catalan (GC), and a so-called “conservative dialect” of European Portuguese (CEP). It is first shown that prenominal possessives with indefinites in both GC and CEP evaluate the possession relation, indicating that there is a close relation between the possessor and the possessum, whereas prenominal possessives in the SI [Indefinite+Poss+N] construction are (non-evaluative) unmarked possessives. It is also argued that prenominal possessives with indefinites in GC and CEP have the syntactic and semantic properties of strong forms (in Cardinaletti 1998’s sense), while prenominal possessives following an indefinite determiner in SI are weak forms. A formal analysis of prenominal possessives with indefinites in the Romance varieties under study which accounts for their particular properties in structural terms is further provided.