In:Silent Instruments: Syntax, semantics, and acquisition of the instrumental role in Italian
Alice Suozzi
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 293] 2026
► pp. ix–xii
Published online: 26 March 2026
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.293.toc
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.293.toc
Table of contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1.Instruments: Semantic characterization and syntactic realization in Italian
1.1Defining Instruments: Semantics
1.1.1Instrumentality
1.1.2Instrumental subroles
1.2Defining Instruments: Syntactic realization
1.2.1The clitic pronoun “ci”
1.3Between semantics and syntax
1.3.1Semantic classes that can enter instrumental syntactic structures
1.3.2Syntactic optionality of Instruments and its implications
1.4Summary of the chapter
Chapter 2.On the argument status of Instruments
2.1The argument/adjunct distinction
2.1.1Traditional accounts
2.1.2The argument-adjunct continuum and the existence
of more (than two) classes
of more (than two) classes
2.2Instruments in Italian: Arguments, adjuncts or something else?
2.2.1Semantic criteria
2.2.2Syntactic diagnostics
2.3The status of Instruments in Italian: Our proposal
2.4Psycholinguistic evidence
2.5Summary of the chapter
Chapter 3.Accounting for Instrument syntactic optionality in Italian
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
3.2Accounting for Instrument omission in Italian: shadow, default
and open instruments
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
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
3.5semantic recoverability and syntactic realization: Discussion of the results
3.6Summary of the chapter
Chapter 4.The acquisition of Instruments in Italian
4.1On the acquisition of argument structure: The role of input
4.2The acquisition of Instruments: Exposure to a non-systematic input
4.2.1Corpus analysis: Instruments in child-directed speech and child speech
4.3The acquisition of Instruments in Italian: Our hypothesis and research questions
4.4Testing our hypothesis: The study
4.4.1Materials
4.4.2Participants and procedure
4.4.3Response coding
4.4.4Results
4.4.5Discussion
4.5Summary of the chapter
Chapter 5.Refining our proposal: shadow and open prototypes, and the defaulting operation
5.1The role of linguistic context in increasing the semantic recoverability of Instruments
5.1.1shadow-, default- and open-verbs: Isolation vs. syntactic context
5.1.1.1shadow-verbs and shadow instruments
5.1.1.2default-verbs and default instruments
5.1.1.3open-verbs and open instruments
5.1.1.4Solving the puzzle: The role of syntactic context and the evanescence of default-verbs
5.2The classification of Instruments revised: shadow and open prototypes, and the operation of defaulting
5.3Summary of the chapter
Conclusions
References
Appendixes
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Index
