A paradigm of psych-predicates. Unraveling the constructional competition between light verb constructions and derived verbs in Italian

The study of Light Verb Constructions (LVCs) has gained growing attention, especially in recent years (e.g., Pompei & Mereu 2019; Pompei et al. 2023). However, the behavior of LVCs still poses many theoretical challenges that are still waiting to be addressed. For instance, it has been noticed that the existence of LVCs in some languages seems to contradict the Principle of No Synonymy, which holds that different forms in a language must have different meanings (Goldberg 1995: 67). As a matter of fact, at least in Romance and Germanic languages, it is common for LVCs to have a near-synonymic synthetic verb counterpart (SVs) (Alba-Salas 2002; Sanromán Vilas 2009; Bonial & Pollard 2020; Alvarez-Morera 2022a), often morphologically related. Since, to the best of our knowledge, there is no systematic quantitative study on the matter in Italian, in this paper we tackle the competition between denominal psych-SVs and psych-LVCs from a Construction Grammar perspective, considering denominal verb derivation schemas (conversion, suffixation, and parasynthesis) and LVCs schemas as (semi)schematic constructions whose empty slot can be filled by nouns expressing psychological states in order to form complex predicates. We perform a two-step analysis, consisting of (i) the collection and description of a dataset of SVs and LVCs based on psych nouns, and (ii) a mixed-effects regression analysis on a sample of synonymous SVs and LVCs found in the dataset. Finally, we propose a formalization of the relationship between SVs and LVCs in constructional terms.