Constructional semantics of Italian light verb constructions

This paper proposes a corpus-driven description of Italian light verb constructions (LVCs), i.e. complex predicates formed by a light verb and either a noun phrase or a prepositional phrase. The light verb prendere, ‘to take’, is the focus of this investigation. LVCs are challenging for many linguistic theories, as they exhibit syntactic properties of verbal phrases and semantic properties of words. Accordingly, various mechanisms have been proposed to account for their formation and interpretation. After briefly describing the properties of Italian LVCs, we propose to consider LVCs as constructions, namely semi-specified syntactic structures stored in the lexicon, with limited productivity. Using the PAISÀ corpus, we conduct a collostructional analysis to extract nouns that significantly collocate with prendere. The collocates are then clustered based on their meaning to identify different subtypes of constructions. Then, we provide a formal representation of their syntactic-semantic configurations and describe their constructional semantics. Our findings reveal that while LVCs with prendere do not adhere strictly to a singular constructional schema, discernible local generalizations emerge. Specifically, we identify three cohesive clusters of LVCs conveying mental processes, changes of state, and the start of events.