The only real pro-nouns. Comparing English one and Italian ne as Noun Phrase pro-forms

The study of pronouns has focused on personal pronouns replacing Determiner Phrases (DPs), paying little attention to pro-forms like English one(s) and Italian ne, which replace subparts of DPs, namely Noun Phrases (NPs). Although ne should be functionally equivalent to one, the two forms seem to obey different constraints. In this paper, we argue that the differences are superficial, and can be ascribed to independent properties of Italian and English. We show that the diverging acceptability of one(s) and ne when these forms appear ‘bare’, i.e. without a determiner, confirms a Carlsonian view of bare nouns, but points to a difference between English and Italian existential bare nouns. We study the conditions for bare ne and show that they shed light on verbs and verb uses which take objects only as representatives of their kinds.