In:Silent Instruments: Syntax, semantics, and acquisition of the instrumental role in Italian
Alice Suozzi
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 293] 2026
► pp. 66–108
Chapter 3Accounting for Instrument syntactic optionality in Italian
Published online: 26 March 2026
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.293.c3
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.293.c3
Article outline
- 3.1Setting the scene: Previous works on optional arguments
- 3.1.1Why are null objects omitted and how are they recovered: semantic recoverability and informativeness
- 3.1.2Pustejovsky’s tripartition of arguments: shadow, default, true
and the theory of co-compositionality
- shadow arguments
- default arguments
- true arguments
- co-compositionality
- 3.2Accounting for Instrument omission in Italian: shadow, default and open instruments
- shadow instruments
- default instruments
- open instruments
- [+I] and [±I] default- and open-verbs
- semantic recoverability and syntactic realization
- 3.3“The top 10 Instruments…”: Testing our hypothesis on Instruments’ semantic recoverability
- 3.3.1Research hypothesis
- 3.3.2Materials
- 3.3.3Participants
- 3.3.4Response coding: What counts as an inst-lexical item
- 3.3.5Results
- Number of inst-lexical items
- Within-participant analysis
- Across-participants analysis
- semantic similarity
- 3.4The corpus analysis: Testing our hypothesis on Instruments’ syntactic realization
- 3.4.1Research hypothesis
- 3.4.2Selection of corpora and procedure
- 3.4.3Results
- Frequencies of occurrence
- Type of verbs Instruments tend to co-occur with
- 3.5semantic recoverability and syntactic realization:
Discussion of the results - 3.6Summary of the chapter
Notes
