In this review article we discuss the main arguments in support of the hypothesis that in Contemporary Catalan and Italian nominal ne is neither a prepositional clitic, nor a partitive clitic nor a quantitative clitic. While the item from which Romance ne originates (Latin inde) pronominalized PPs with locative meanings, similarly to what happens with de, following a grammaticalization cline, ne comes to pronominalize different layers of nominal structure, and in contemporary Romance also expresses non-specific indefiniteness. We maintain that, syntactically, whereas partitivity is characterized as being a birelational category that necessarily connects a subset to a maximal superset, the indefinite use of ne is not birelational in the same sense. We support the hypothesis that nominal ne is a property-type anaphora that resumes a non-specific weak indefinite nominal expression. We review a number of syntactic and semantic arguments in support of the non-partitivity of nominal ne in Catalan and Italian, from which we conclude that it is a pro-NP, unmarked for gender and number, whose antecedent cannot have a unique or maximal reference.
Espinal et al. (Fri,) studied this question.