This paper aims to support the thesis that Speech Act related operators have landing sites in syntax, specifically at the syntax-pragmatics interface. In order to attain this goal, it presents the first formal analysis of a construction, dubbed the jo ‘I’ – construction, that shows an overt first person strong pronoun sitting in sentence-initial position of declarative sentences both in pro-drop and partial pro-drop languages of the Romance family. Taking Catalan as a case in point, it is shown that, prosodically, this first person strong pronoun has a particular intonation (a rising pitch accent followed by a high boundary tone). Syntactically, it corresponds not to a subject but to a (kind of) hanging topic that requires a resumptive element in the clause, while semantically it introduces a reference to the speaker who at the time of uttering the sentence is performing a subjective declaration speech act.

This paper examines indefinite interpretations associated with morphologically definite articles in Italian, such as Ha comprato {i tulipani / l’olio} (‘She bought (the) tulips / (the) oil’), which allow both a default definite reading and an indefinite interpretation. The paper addresses two main research questions: (i) what grammatical conditions allow indefinite definites in Italian?, and (ii) why do only Italo-Romance varieties, and not other Romance languages, allow the presence of indefinite definites (in addition to bare nouns, the so called “partitive article” and even a bare di)? The primary contribution of the paper is to show that the indefinite reading of definite internal arguments in Italian cannot be derived from a weak definite approach, from kind denotation, or from an operation of derived kind predication. Instead, we argue that internal definite (plural and mass) arguments can be interpreted as conveying an indefinite reading, as long as the event in which they participate denotes incremental homogeneity (Landman and Rothstein 2010, 2012a, 2012b). This hypothesis is supported by the productivity of indefinite definites in habitual (and iterative) contexts, which are incrementally homogeneous by definition; and their compatibility with per ‘for’ (and ogni ‘every’ N) temporal modifiers. Concerning the cross-linguistic and cross-dialectal puzzle, the paper highlights that the use of indefinite definites for the expression of weak indefiniteness reveals the bidirectional influence between dialectal substrata and the national language, giving prominence to the role of competing grammars in speakers of informal Italian.