The negative indefinite nuddu ‘no one’ as a floating quantifier in Sicilian

This paper is concerned with a special use of the negative indefinite pronoun nuddu in Sicilian. Alongside its normal use as a negative pronominal quantifier ('no one, nobody'), this element can be employed as a floating quantifier ('none of us/you/them'). In this function, nuddu is not the subject of the sentence and, despite the semantic similarity, it cannot be analysed as the pronominal head of a partitive configuration. After presenting data on the diachronic development of this pronoun, which has resulted in inflectional loss, I discuss both syntactic and semantic arguments in favour of an adverbial analysis of this floating quantifier, according to which nuddu involves predicate modification.