Support nouns and verbal features: a case study from Italian

This paper aims at delimiting and discussing a class of nouns that display a property considered until now as typical to verbs. We call them "Support Nouns" on the assumption them to share with Support Verbs the property of "supporting" somehow the second component of the Noun Phrase they are part of by providing it with peculiar grammatical information. In such cases (e.g. Italian colpo di fortuna 'stroke of luck', attacco di gelosia 'fit of jealousy') the first noun has not its literal meaning but indicates a "short time-span" or an "almost dot-like" process into which the designatum of the remaining part of the Noun Phrase is involved. On the basis of a corpus analysis we shall claim that Support Nouns: form a principled sub-class of nouns; somehow parallel Support Verbs in "supporting" the other element of the phrase; and contain verbal features.