Binomial constructions: inheritance, specification and subregularities

The traditional division of work between morphology/lexicon and syntax has recently been challenged by approaches that posit a non-strict division between syntax, morphology and the lexicon, most notably Construction Grammar and related approaches such as Construction Morphology. These theories advocate for a unique notational device for all traditional components of the grammar and aim at a better understanding of the language as a unified phenomenon. In this perspective, all levels of description are understood to involve constructions, i.e., form-meaning pairings differing in size and complexity. The most remarkable implication of this approach is that the principled distinction between the core and the periphery of the grammar fades away: all constructions (including idioms and similar phenomena) are equally important for the description and understanding of linguistic systems. This paper stems from these observations and aims at investigating the form and meaning of Italian Binomial Constructions (e.g. bianco e nero ‘black and white’, anima e corpo ‘body and soul’). Despite their syntactically coordinated structure, BCs display a unitary and often conventionalized semantics and a high morphosyntactic cohesion. Therefore, they cannot be regarded as either prototypical words or prototypical phrases. However, Italian BCs are not a completely idiosynchratic phenomenon: even though there is a certain degree of idiomaticity, a fine-grained structural and semantic analysis may reveal some subregularities within this domain. In this paper we will adopt the tools of constructionist approaches to grasp these generalizations and to simultaneously account for idiomatic and subregular cases. After a brief review of the literature on Binomial Constructions in general, the paper offers an overview of Binomial Constructions in the Italian language, with a focus on their structural, morphosyntactic and semantic properties. Finally, a theoretical, constructionist analysis of Binomial Constructions is provided.