Restrictions on Italian verbal evaluative suffixes: The role of aspect and actionality

Evaluative morphology has been widely described in the literature in the field. However, scholars have always ignored evaluative constructions with a verb as the base. Actually, evaluative verbs are cross-linguistically less widespread than evaluative nouns and adjectives. Moreover, even in languages in which they display a satisfactory degree of productivity (as in Italian), their occurrences are far from being homogeneous: the distribution of evaluative verbs is highly constrained by the context of occurrence, that is by the tense of the verb. The paper is structured as follows. In section 1, a short definition of ‘evaluative morphology’ is given. Section 2 is devoted to presentation and classification of data. Sections 3 and 4 give reason of the low frequency of Italian ‘evaluative verbs’. In section 3 I investigate restrictions on the application of verbal evaluative suffixes, focusing on the role of actionality (data will show that only durative, dynamic, and atelic verbs can productively join an evaluative suffix). In section 4, constraints on the output of these word formation rules are described: verbs formed by means of an evaluative suffix usually occur only in tenses which convey an imperfective meaning. In the appendix, the whole list of approximately 150 Italian evaluative verbs on which the analysis presented in this paper is based is given.