The morphological expression of approximation: The emerging simil-construction in Italian

This paper contributes to the study of evaluative morphology by investigating an emerging morphological construction in Italian within the framework of Construction Morphology. The schema in question, which contains the string simil-(related to the adjective simile ‘similar’) plus a nominal or adjectival base, is analyzed as a newly-created construction that conveys a number of closely-related senses (i.e., fakeness, imitation, resemblance, vagueness, and kin-categorization) revolving around the functional domain of approximation, which has received much less attention than other domains within evaluative morphology. Beside discussing the formal, semantic and usage properties of simil-expressions on the basis of corpus data, we propose a constructional network that accounts for their behavior. Finally, we discuss the nature of simil-as an affixoid and explore its relationship with other competing (morphological and, more marginally, analytic) strategies in Italian.