Francesca Masini

The Role of Second Order Schemas in the Construction of Complex Words

Morphology is the study of the systematic relationship between the form and meaning of complex words. Therefore, it is a central task of morphology to provide a proper account of how the meanings of complex words are computed. One straightforward approach would be to assume that the computation of complex words is ruled by Fregean compositionality. The latter, however, has been claimed to be too narrow, since both syntactic and morphological constructions may exhibit specific holistic semantic properties that cannot be derived from their constituents or from general patterns of combination (Booij, Construction morphology. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010; Goldberg, Constructions. A construction grammar approach to argument structure. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1995; Goldberg, Constructions at work. The nature of generalization in language. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006; Jackendoff, Constructions in the parallel architecture. In: Hoffmann T, Trousdale G (eds) The Oxford handbook of construction grammar. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 70–92, 2013). In the article we address a related problem, i.e. the fact that the meaning of a complex word may derive from that of another linguistic construct (be it a word or a phrase) that is not a building block of that complex word. We illustrate this point by providing data from different languages and we claim that this type of violation of Fregean compositionality can be accounted for by means of “second order schemas”, i.e. sets of two or more paradigmatically related constructional schemas.

Schemas and Discontinuity in Italian: The View from Construction Morphology

In this paper we use the tools of Construction Morphology to explore Italian morphological and lexical constructions characterized by some kind of structural discontinuity. Our goal is to show how a constructionist view of language can account for non-contiguous structures in the lexicon. In particular, the paper deals with four (well-known and lesser-known) case-studies: (i) particle verbs and discontinuous idioms; (ii) bracketing paradoxes, where the suffix splits the phrase in two; (iii) parasynthetic verbs, where discontinuity is represented by the simultaneous addition of prefixation and conversion to a noun or adjective to create a verb; and, finally, (iv) discontinuous reduplication with numerals, a (so far undescribed) construction where a numeral is reduplicated “around” the head noun. In order to account for these different types of discontinuities, we use a variety of theoretical tools and notions developed within Construction Morphology and Construction Grammar.

Binomi coordinati in italiano

In questo lavoro si analizzano i binomi coordinati in italiano, ovvero espressioni coordinate che presentano solitamente un ordine relativo fisso (equo e solidale) o preferito (sale e pepe). Il contributo offre una rassegna degli studi precedenti sull’argomento, per poi passare a un’analisi strutturale e semantica dei binomi coordinati in italiano basata su un corpus di circa 500 elementi. Lo studio si chiude con alcune riflessioni sul rapporto tra binomi coordinati e fenomeni morfologici simili quali i composti e le reduplicazioni.