Italian VeV lexical constructions

In this paper, we offer a fine-grained analysis of Italian VeV lexical constructions, i.e., phrasal lexemes formed by two conjoined verbs that yield a noun or an adjective as output. These constructions are peculiar in that they cannot be regarded as prototypical words, but nonetheless have the status of lexemes. In our analysis, we use two approaches. On the one hand, we apply to VeV lexemes the traditional methodology used in Lexical Morphology in order to capture the generalizations underlying the formations of these items. Therefore, we look for constraints on the input and the output of VeV lexemes at the main levels of linguistic analysis, namely phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. On the other hand, we make use of usage-based constructionist models in order to account for the rise of various semantic classes of VeV lexemes and new formations. Data form corpora show that the emergence of VeV lexemes is to be ascribed to the entrenchment of a few exemplars, which lead to the creation of more abstract constructions that in turn license the formation of new lexemes. Finally, VeV lexemes are found to be closely related to other VV lexemes in Italian that are usually ascribed to the realm of compounding: all these constructions are dedicated strategies to encode a complex event semantics into different linguistic forms, namely nouns and adjectives (but not verbs). This obvioulsy raises interesting typological questions regarding the nature and role of lexicalization strategies involving two verbs in the languages of the world, which we leave for future research.