Possessives in indefinite nominal phrases: A comparison between Italo-Romance and Daco-Romance

Abstract

Southern Italian dialects exhibit a peculiar morphosyntactic device in licensing possessives in non‑definite noun phrases, i.e. the insertion of the functional element de followed by the definite article. This strategy shows striking similarities with the functional element A(-) employed in Romanian to introduce a possessive or a noun phrase marked as a genitive when it is not linearly preceded by a noun phrase marked as definite. This paper proves that an identical syntactic structure is detectable in both groups of varieties which stems from the definiteness requirements of the genitive.