{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.0234192037470726, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 4.979020979020979, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The Status of
 De
 in Romance Indefinites, Partitives and Pseudopartitives*

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.