Abstract
In Italian, nominal infinitives (“infinito sostantivato”, e.g. Il partire, rendered in English as gerunds: ‘the leaving’) are commonly used as verb arguments alongside deverbal nouns (formed by means of suffixes such as -ione, -mento, -aggio, -nza, e.g. la partenza ‘the departure’). Both nominalization strategies seem to denote eventualities, and in some cases both are widely used, raising the question of how their meanings differ or whether there could be semantic competition among them. The paper uses corpus-based methods to study the distribution of these forms, with the aim of understanding the rationale behind the choice of one morphological process rather than the other. We found out that when both derivatives are built from the same base they frequently bring out distinct verb meanings, often one more concrete, the other more abstract, as it emerges from the different types of complements the two forms tend to select.
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- 1.
- 2.
These have sometimes been called verbal nouns; however we prefer nominal verbs in order to avoid ambiguity and confusion with the class of deverbal nouns.
- 3.
Excluding cases of lexicalized items, such as building, being, binding and so on. These are also the only ones that can be pluralized.
- 4.
We will not discuss here the nature of the conversion processes in general, since this is orthogonal to our present concern. For some linguists it is a syntactic process (e.g. Farrell, 2001), while for others it is usually a morphological one. In some cases, both options may be open (Plag, 2003). Furthermore, the case of NIs may be seen not as a case of conversion, but rather as word-class changing inflection (Haspelmath, 1996).
- 5.
Excluding BNIs that, as we have seen, do not show the same syntactic distribution.
- 6.
We extracted NIs with a script which looked for infinitive forms occurring after a determiner. The results for EDNs were manually cleaned from words ending in -mento or -zione that are not suffixed words (e.g. commento, ‘comment’).
- 7.
With respect to the lower type frequency of NI, recall however that when no external argument is present a speaker has a third alternative apart from NI and EDN, namely BNI, the determinerless nominal infinitive. While it is difficult to quantify the nominal uses of bare infinitives, a rough estimate suggests that BNI are actually quite more frequent than NI, a fact for which their less complex structure (i.e. the lack of the determiner) could also play a role. This effect could thus contribute to explain the V productivity results.
- 8.
Fradin (2019) observes the same pattern found by Martin and reformulates it in what he calls “the Repartition Hypothesis”.
- 9.
She also suggests a different version of the agentivity parameter, but we will not consider it in the present study since we did not find her approach entirely convincing. For further details, see Martin (2010: 122–124).
- 10.
This approach is in line with the conclusions reached by Fradin (2019), i.e. that the similarity of distribution of two doublets is a good metric of their degree of competition.
- 11.
This notation stands for “Observed frequency of element 1 with construction 1.”
- 12.
As an alternative, we also calculated the ratio of the number of significantly different argument types to the total number of arguments types attested. We believe, however, that this measure is less appropriate, since it gives the same importance to arguments that occur only once as to arguments that occur for the half of the total number of occurrences.
- 13.
Adapted from the Sabatini-Coletti online dictionary.
- 14.
A U-test (or Wilcoxon test) was computed, instead of the common t-test, since the distributions of values of the two groups were not normally distributed, as shown by a Shapiro-Wilk test (W = 0.96859, p-value <0.001).
- 15.
Remember that in the Della Rosa dataset participants were asked to rate either “abstractness” or “concreteness”. This makes the judgments more robust with respect to the way the question was formulated.
- 16.
We thank Ingo Plag for this observation.
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Acknowledgments and Additional Notes
We thank the audience of the 17th International Morphology Meeting for their feedback and the reviewers of this article for their precious comments. All errors are of course our own. The authors are listed in order of decreasing responsibility for the contents.
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Varvara, R., Zamparelli, R. (2019). Competition Between Event-Denoting Deverbal Nouns and Nominal Infinitives in Italian. In: Rainer, F., Gardani, F., Dressler, W., Luschützky, H. (eds) Competition in Inflection and Word-Formation . Studies in Morphology, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02550-2_4
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