Parting ways with the partitive view: a corpus-based account of the Italian particle \ne\""
Authors: Alice Mariotti, Malvina Nissim (Università di Bologna, University of Groningen, 2014)
Topic: Lexical and Semantic Resources and Analysis

Abstract
The Italian clitic “ne” is traditionally described as a partitive particle. Through an an- notation exercise leading to the creation of a 500 instance dataset, we show that the partitive fea- ture isn’t dominant, and the anaphoric properties of “ne”, syntactically and semantically, are what we should focus on for a comprehensive picture of this particle, also in view of its computational treatment.

Introduction
The Italian particle “ne” is a clitic pronoun. Tradi-tionally, linguistic accounts of “ne” focus on two of its aspects: its syntactic behaviour and its being a conveyor of partitive relations. Syntactically, this particle has been studied extensively, especially in connection with unac-cusative verbs (Belletti and Rizzi, 1981; Burzio, 1986; Sorace, 2000). In Russi’s volume specifically dedicated to clitics, the chapter devoted to “ne” only focuses on the grammaticalisation process which brought the clitic to be incorporated in some verbs, causing it to lose its pronominal properties. It is referred to as “the ‘partitive’ ne” (Russi, 2008, p. 9). In (Cordin, 2001), the clitic is described in detail, and shown to serve three main uses. It can be a partitive pronoun, usually followed by a quantifier, as in (1). It can be used purely anaphorically to refer to a previously introduced entity, such as “medicine” in (2). The third use is as a locative adverb, like in (3).1 (1) Quanti giocatori di quell’U17-U19 quest’anno o l’anno scorso hanno giocato minuti importanti in prima squadra? A me ne risultano 2 o 3. How many players of that U17-U19 [team] this year or last year have played important minutes in the first team? I think 2 or 3 [of them] (2) Tu sai che la medicina fa bene e pretendi che il palato, pur sentendone l’amaro, continui a gustarla come se fosse dolce. You know that the medicine is good for you, and you ask your palate to enjoy it as if it was sweet, in spite of tasting [its] bitterness. (3) Me ne vado. I’m leaving. Note that for both partitive and non-partitive uses, in order to interpret the ne, the antecedent must be identified (“players of that U17-U19 [team]” in (1) and “medicine” for (2)). While there has been a recent effort to highlight the anaphoric properties of real occurrences of “ne” (Nissim and Perboni, 2008), there isn’t as yet a comprehensive picture of this particle. In this paper, we contribute a series of annotation schemes that capture the anaphoric nature of “ne”, and account for the different kinds of relations it establishes with its antecedent. We also contribute an annotated dataset that can be used for training automatic resolution systems, and that as of now provides us with a picture of this particle which is the most comprehensive to date.

Conclusion
Actual corpus data, annotated thanks to the development of specific annotation schemes focused on the anaphoric potential of “ne”, shows that the function of “ne” cannot be at all limited to a ‘partitive’ pronoun or as a test for certain syntactic types, as it is usually done in the theoretical literature. It also highlights several aspect of the anaphoric properties of “ne”, both semantically and syntactically. We plan to exploit the dataset to develop an automatic resolution system.