Questione di stile. L’espressione analitica della maniera indessicale

This contribution aims to explore the semantic and structural properties of the construction [stile N], an analytical construction that is taking hold in contemporary Italian to express manner starting from nouns. The word stile “style” followed by a nominal often appears within prepositional phrases (e.g. in puro stile McDonald “in pure McDonald style”), but in this work we focus on the occurrences in which stile is juxtaposed to the head it modifies, without the intermediation of the preposition (e.g. musica di sottofondo stile piano-bar “piano-bar-style background music”). Based on examples extracted from the corpus of written Italian coris, we show how these uses are regulated by a series of formal and functional properties, which lead us to analyze this pattern in terms of Construction Grammar. Great attention is devoted to the inherently indexical semantics of this construction, the interpretation of which largely depends on context and shared knowledge. To conclude, some analytical constructions competing with [stile N] are briefly discussed, illustrating their different distribution and proposing some explanatory hypotheses to be answered through new dedicated and wide-ranging research.