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Cognate constructions in Italian and beyond

A lexical semantic approach
  • Chiara Melloni and Francesca Masini
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Contrastive Studies in Verbal Valency
This chapter is in the book Contrastive Studies in Verbal Valency

Abstract

This paper contains a lexico-semantic analysis of Cognate Constructions (CCs), i.e. argument structure patterns in which the verb and its nominal complement are morphologically or semantically related, mainly based on Italian data. We identify three types of CCs which display morphologically cognate nouns in Italian, namely: i) the Cognate Object Construction (COC), where the verb takes a direct cognate object; ii) a CC where the verb takes a cognate complement introduced by the prepositiondi‘of’; iii) a CC where the verb takes a cognate complement introduced by the prepositioncon‘with’. The paper mainly focuses on the COC, but the CCs withdi‘of’ andcon‘with’ are also discussed. The analysis is carried out by combining corpus-based methods on the one hand, and lexico-semantic analytic tools on the other. Various semantic classes of verbs are analyzed in detail, including classes hardly discussed in previous literature, and a number of constraints and mechanisms are proposed in order to explain the occurrence and behaviour of CCs in Italian. A look at CCs in other languages reveals an interesting parallelism between this Italian (and Romance) pattern and some “adverbial-like” cognate objects found in typologically different languages such as Russian and Hebrew, proving once more that crosslinguistic comparison can improve our understanding of intralinguistic facts.

Abstract

This paper contains a lexico-semantic analysis of Cognate Constructions (CCs), i.e. argument structure patterns in which the verb and its nominal complement are morphologically or semantically related, mainly based on Italian data. We identify three types of CCs which display morphologically cognate nouns in Italian, namely: i) the Cognate Object Construction (COC), where the verb takes a direct cognate object; ii) a CC where the verb takes a cognate complement introduced by the prepositiondi‘of’; iii) a CC where the verb takes a cognate complement introduced by the prepositioncon‘with’. The paper mainly focuses on the COC, but the CCs withdi‘of’ andcon‘with’ are also discussed. The analysis is carried out by combining corpus-based methods on the one hand, and lexico-semantic analytic tools on the other. Various semantic classes of verbs are analyzed in detail, including classes hardly discussed in previous literature, and a number of constraints and mechanisms are proposed in order to explain the occurrence and behaviour of CCs in Italian. A look at CCs in other languages reveals an interesting parallelism between this Italian (and Romance) pattern and some “adverbial-like” cognate objects found in typologically different languages such as Russian and Hebrew, proving once more that crosslinguistic comparison can improve our understanding of intralinguistic facts.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Mary Esther Kropp Dakubu In Memoriam vii
  4. Introduction. Issues in contrastive valency studies 1
  5. Part I. Argument coding
  6. Multiple case binding – The principled underspecification of case exponency 27
  7. Infinitives 83
  8. A labeling system for valency 109
  9. Non-canonical valency patterns in Basque, variation and evolution 151
  10. Part II. Valency rearranging alternations
  11. Exploring the domain of ditransitive constructions 177
  12. Cognate constructions in Italian and beyond 219
  13. Object omission and the semantics of predicates in Italian in a comparative perspective 251
  14. On animacy restrictions for the null object in Brazilian Portuguese 275
  15. Part III. Voice and valency changing (uncoded/coded) alternations and markers
  16. Between Passive and Middle 297
  17. Valency alternations between inflection and derivation 327
  18. Pronominal verbs across European languages 375
  19. Semantic constraints on the reflexive/non-reflexive alternation of Romanian unaccusatives 407
  20. Circumfixed causatives in Polish against a panorama of active and non-active voice morphology 431
  21. Language index 471
  22. Subject index 473
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.237.07mel

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Mary Esther Kropp Dakubu In Memoriam vii
  4. Introduction. Issues in contrastive valency studies 1
  5. Part I. Argument coding
  6. Multiple case binding – The principled underspecification of case exponency 27
  7. Infinitives 83
  8. A labeling system for valency 109
  9. Non-canonical valency patterns in Basque, variation and evolution 151
  10. Part II. Valency rearranging alternations
  11. Exploring the domain of ditransitive constructions 177
  12. Cognate constructions in Italian and beyond 219
  13. Object omission and the semantics of predicates in Italian in a comparative perspective 251
  14. On animacy restrictions for the null object in Brazilian Portuguese 275
  15. Part III. Voice and valency changing (uncoded/coded) alternations and markers
  16. Between Passive and Middle 297
  17. Valency alternations between inflection and derivation 327
  18. Pronominal verbs across European languages 375
  19. Semantic constraints on the reflexive/non-reflexive alternation of Romanian unaccusatives 407
  20. Circumfixed causatives in Polish against a panorama of active and non-active voice morphology 431
  21. Language index 471
  22. Subject index 473
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