LSRL 38, Urbana, Il., april 2008 Romanian Quantitative Expressions and the trigger of de– insertion Ion Giurgea University of Paris 7 & The Institute of Linguistics of the Romanian Academy giurgeaion@yahoo.com 1. Issue: The connection between de- insertion and agreement: (cf. Milner 1978, Bovee 1995, Doetjes 1997): (1) a. plusieurs / quelques enfants several-pl. some-pl. children b. beaucoup/peu d’enfants / de lait many few of children/ of milk c. molti/pocchi bambini many-mpl./few-mpl. children Romanian cardinals: de is inserted after cardinals showing different ϕ-features from those of the noun (we will call them ‘inherent’ ϕ-features of the cardinal): - 2-19 and compounds of ‘hundred/thousand’ + 1-19 : no de; the cardinals from 1 to 19 are either non inflected or agree with the noun (1 and 2) 1 : (2) a. doi băieŃi / două fete two-masc children/ two-fem girls b. trei/patru/unsprezece băieŃi/fete three/four/eleven boys/girls - The other cardinals – starting from 20, except for compounds of ‘hundred/thousand’ + 1-19, insert de. 1 For the number ’1’, a true cardinal = an item with the distribution of quantitative expressions, i..e. which can be preceded by a Det – may only appear in coordination, as the first member. Otherwise, the indefinite article is used to convey the cardinal meaning (in which case it may be stressed ): (i) aceste/cele două case these/the two houses (ii) *această/cea o casă / * una casă this/the one house / one-the house (iii) the one God (iv) aceste/cele una sau două zile these/the one or two days This phenomenon appears in other Romance languages as well. I suggest that the explanation is that the quantitative head Q, whose specifier hosts the cardinal, is specified for pl./mass., so that the quantitative ‘one’ would trigger an agreement mismatch, except when coordinated with a plural quantitative. The obligatory order ‘one’ + pl.quant. may be explained by assuming that these structures involve agreement with the last member of the conjunction.