The dual nature of Deverbal Nominal Constructions: Evidence from acceptability ratings and corpus analysis
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Abstract
The Deverbal Nominal Construction of modern Italian belongs to a class of phenomena that present interesting theoretical challenges given their ambiguous status between morphological compounding and syntax. In this paper, we combine evidence from corpora and a systematic elicitation experiment to propose that Deverbal Nominal Constructions are actually a spurious class, including both true compounds and constructions that belong to the impoverished syntax of telegraphic language, signs and headlines. Besides providing results that allow us to maintain a stronger view of the separation of morpho-lexical and syntactic phenomena, the study also serves as a general illustration of how empirical methods from corpus analysis and psycholinguistics can be brought to bear on issues of interest to the general theory of language.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
Articles in the same Issue
- Corpora and experimental methods: A state-of-the-art review
- The dual nature of Deverbal Nominal Constructions: Evidence from acceptability ratings and corpus analysis
- Formulaic language in native speakers: Triangulating psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and education
- Adjective-noun collocations in elicited and corpus data: Similarities, differences, and the whys and wherefores
- Investigating elicited data from a usage-based perspective
- Converging evidence from corpus and experimental data to capture idiomaticity
Articles in the same Issue
- Corpora and experimental methods: A state-of-the-art review
- The dual nature of Deverbal Nominal Constructions: Evidence from acceptability ratings and corpus analysis
- Formulaic language in native speakers: Triangulating psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and education
- Adjective-noun collocations in elicited and corpus data: Similarities, differences, and the whys and wherefores
- Investigating elicited data from a usage-based perspective
- Converging evidence from corpus and experimental data to capture idiomaticity
