Costruzioni su costruzioni: idiomaticity and regularity of NPN discontinuous reduplications in Italian

The paper provides a first description and a usage–based constructionist analysis of one specific type of lexically open idiom in Italian, namely the reduplicative NPN pattern responsible for expressions like “giorno dopo giorno” (day after day), “centimetro per centimetro” (inch by inch) or “errori su errori” (mistake after mistake). The paper presents the findings of a corpus–based exploration of NPN expressions in contemporary written Italian and offers a first analysis of the constructional network they develop.