Cognate constructions in Italian and beyond: A lexical semantic approach

This paper contains a lexico-semantic analysis of Cognate Constructions (CCs), i.e. argument structure patterns in which the verb and its nominal complement are morphologically or semantically related, mainly based on Italian data. We identify three types of CCs which display morphologically cognate nouns in Italian, namely: i) the Cognate Object Construction (COC), where the verb takes a direct cognate object; ii) a CC where the verb takes a cognate complement introduced by the preposition di ‘of’; iii) a CC where the verb takes a cognate complement introduced by the preposition con ‘with’. The paper mainly focuses on the COC, but the CCs with di ‘of’ and con ‘with’ are also discussed. The analysis is carried out by combining corpus-based methods on the one hand, and lexico-semantic analytic tools on the other. Various semantic classes of verbs are analyzed in detail, including classes hardly discussed in previous literature, and a number of constraints and mechanisms are proposed in order to explain the occurrence and behaviour of CCs in Italian. A look at CCs in other languages reveals an interesting parallelism between this Italian (and Romance) pattern and some “adverbial-like” cognate objects found in typologically different languages such as Russian and Hebrew, proving once more that crosslinguistic comparison can improve our understanding of intralinguistic facts.