Cover not available

Article published In: Lingvisticæ Investigationes
Vol. 44:1 (2021) ► pp.66–100

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

Compounding in Old Italian

A constructionist analysis

 | University of Milano-Bicocca
Published online: 20 September 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/li.00057.mic
Abstract
This paper provides a corpus-based analysis of compounding in Old Italian. The semantic and formal properties of compound words attested in Old Italian are described and discussed through the theoretical tools provided by Construction Morphology. The analysis confirms that compounding is exploited since the earliest attestations of the language. It reveals that Old Italian compounds are mostly right-headed endocentric or exocentric: particularly, endocentric [ADV-Y]Y, [A-N]N|A and exocentric [V-N]N are the most productive schemas. Moreover, this study highlights a significant influence of Latin on Italian compounding, whereby many Old Italian compounds are Latin loanwords and calques which served as a model for the creation of new native compounds.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework and methodology
  • 3.Analysis
    • 3.1Left-headed endocentric Constructionscomp in Old Italian
    • 3.2Right-headed endocentric Constructionscomp in Old Italian
    • 3.3Coordinative endocentric Constructionscomp in Old Italian
    • 3.4Exocentric Constructionscomp in Old Italian
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
References (70)
References
Arcodia, G. F. 2018. Coordinating nominal compounds: Universals vs. areal tendencies. Linguistics, 56 (6), 1197–1243. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Arcodia, G. F., & Basciano, B. 2018. The Construction Morphology Analysis of Chinese Word Formation. In G. Booij (Ed.), The Construction of Words: Advances in Construction Morphology, 219–253. Cham: Springer, vol. 41. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Arcodia, G. F., Grandi, N., & Wälchli, B. 2010. Coordination in compounding. In S. Scalise & I. Vogel (Eds.), Cross-disciplinary issues in compounding, 177–198. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baroni, M., Guevara, E., & Pirrelli, V. 2007. NN compounds in Italian: Modelling category induction and analogical extension. Lingue e Linguaggio, 6 (2), 263–290.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2009. Sulla tipologia dei composti N+N in italiano: Principi categoriali ed evidenza distribuzionale a confronto. In G. Ferrari, M. Mosca & R. Benatti (Eds.), Linguistica e modelli tecnologici di ricerca. Atti del XL Congresso Internazionale di studi della Società di Linguistica Italiana (Vercelli, 21–23 settembre 2006), 73–95. Roma: Bulzoni.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baroni, M., Guevara, E., & Zamparelli, R. 2009. The dual nature of deverbal nominal constructions: evidence from acceptability ratings and corpus analysis. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 5 (1), 27–60. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bauer, B. 2011. Word formation. In M. Maiden, J. C. Smith, & A. Ledgeway (Eds.), The Cambridge history of the Romance languages: Vol. I. Structures, 532–563. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bauer, L. 2005. The borderline between derivation and compounding. In W. Dressler, D. Kastovsky, O. Pfeiffer & F. Rainer (Eds.), Morphology and its Demarcations, 97–108. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bisetto, A. 1999. Note sui composti VN dell’italiano. In P. Benincà, A. M. Mioni & L. Vanelli (Eds.), Fonologia e Morfologia dell’Italiano e dei Dialetti d’Italia. Atti del XXXI Congresso Internazionale di studi della Società di Linguistica Italiana (Padova, 25–27 settembre 1997), 1000–1036. Roma: Bulzoni.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2017. Osservazioni sui composti verbo-nome dell’italiano antico. In P. D’Achille & M. Grossmann (Eds.), Per la storia della formazione delle parole in italiano. Un nuovo corpus in rete (MIDIA) e nuove prospettive di studio, 99–117. Firenze: Franco Cesati.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bisetto, A., & Scalise, S. 2005. The classification of compounds. Lingue e Linguaggio, 4 (2), 319–20.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Booij, G. 2008. Constructional idioms as products of language change: The aan het + INFINITIVE construction in Dutch. In A. Bergs & G. Diewald (Eds.), Construction grammar and language change, 79–104. Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2010a. Construction Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2010b. Compound construction: Schemas or analogy? A construction morphology perspective. In S. Scalise & I. Vogel (Eds.), Cross-disciplinary Issues in Compounding, 93–108. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2010c. Construction Morphology. Language and Linguistics Compass, 41, 543–555. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Booij, G., & Hüning, M. 2014. Affixoids and constructional idioms. In R. Boogaart, T. Colleman & G. Rutten (Eds.), Extending the scope of Construction Grammar, 47–66. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bouillon, P., Ježek, E., Melloni, C., & Picton, A. 2012. Annotating qualia relations in Italian and French complex nominals. In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, T. Declerck, M. Uğur Doğan, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, J. Odijk & S. Piperidis (Eds.), The eighth international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, 1527–1532.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brucale, L. 2012. Latin compounds. Probus, 241, 93–117. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Buchi, E., & Chauveau, J-P. 2015. From Latin to Romance. In P. O. Müller, I. Ohnheiser, S. Olsen & F. Rainer (Eds.), Word-Formation: An International Handbook of the Languages of Europe, 1931–1957. Berlin: de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dardano, M. 2009. Costruire parole: La morfologia derivativa dell’italiano. Bologna: Il Mulino.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dressler, W. U., & Thornton, A. M. 1991. Doppie basi e binarismo nella morfologia italiana. Rivista di Linguistica, 3 (1), 3–22.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Du Cange, et al., 1982. Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis. Niort: L. Favre. [URL]
Floricic, F. 2008. The Italian verb-noun anthroponimic compounds at the Syntax/morphology interface. Morphology, 18 (2), 167–193. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gaeta, L. 2008. Constituent order in compounds and syntax: Typology and diachrony. Morphology, 18 (2), 117–141. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gather, A. 2001. Romanische Verb-Nomen-Komposita. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Giacalone Ramat, A., & Mauri, C. 2008. From cause to contrast: A study in semantic change. In E. Verhoeven, S. Skopeteas, Y. Shin, Y. Nishina & J. Helmbrecht (Eds.), Studies on Grammaticalization, 303–320. Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Grandi, N. 2006. Considerazioni sulla definizione e la classificazione dei composti. Annali dell’Università di Ferrara. Sezione di Lettere online 11, 31–52.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Grandi, N., Nissim, M., & Tamburini, F. 2011. Noun-clad adjectives. On the adjectival status of non-head constituents of Italian attributive compounds. Lingue e Linguaggio, 10 (1), 161–70.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Grossmann, M. 2012. Romanian compounds. Probus, 147–173. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Grossmann, M., & D’Achille, P. 2019. Compound color terms in Italian. In I. Raffaelli, D. Katuna & B. Kerovec (Eds.), Lexicalization patterns in color naming: A cross-linguistic perspective, 61–79. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Iacobini, C. 2015. Foreign word-formation in Italian. In P. O. Müller, I. Ohnheiser, S. Olsen & F. Rainer (Eds.), Word-formation: An International Handbook of the Languages of Europe, 1660–1679. Berlin: de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Iacobini, C., & Thornton, A. M. 1992. Tendenze nella formazione delle parole nell’italiano del ventesimo secolo. In B. Moretti, D. Petrini & S. Bianconi (Eds.), Linee di tendenza dell’italiano contemporaneo. Atti del XXV Congresso Internazionale di Studi della Società di Linguistica Italiana (Lugano, 19–21 settembre 1991), 25–55. Roma: Bulzoni.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Klingebiel, K. 1989. Noun+verb compounding in Western Romance (Vol. 1131). Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lasserre, M. 2016. De l’intrusion d’un lexique allogène. Le’exemple des éléments néoclassiques. PhD dissertation. University of Toulouse II – Jean Jaurès.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Litta, E., Passarotti, M., & Culy, C. 2016. Formatio formosa est. Building a Word Formation Lexicon for Latin. In Proceedings of the Third Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC–it 2016), 185–189.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lombardi Vallauri, E. 2008. Composti intitolativi in italiano: Un’oscillazione. In E. Cresti (Ed.), Prospettive nello studio del lessico italiano. Atti del IX congresso della Società Internazionale di Linguistica e Filologia Italiana (Firenze, 14–17 giugno 2006), 555–562. Firenze: Firenze University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Masini, F., & Audring, J. 2019. Construction Morphology. In J. Audring & F. Masini (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Morphological Theory, 365–389. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Masini, F., & Iacobini, C. 2018. Schemas and discontinuity in Italian: The view from Construction Morphology. In G. Booij (Ed.), The Construction of Words: Advances in Construction Morphology, 81–109. Cham: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Masini, F., & Scalise, S. 2012. Italian compounds. Probus, 61–91. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Massam, D. 2009. Noun incorporation: Essentials and extensions. Language and linguistics compass, 3 (4), 1076–1096. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Meyer-Lübke, W. 1890. Italienische Grammatik (Vol. 21). Leipzig: Reisland.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Micheli, M. S. 2019. The diachrony of Italian mal(e)- constructions: From compounding to derivation. Lingue e Linguaggio, 18 (1), 91–118.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2020. Composizione italiana in diacronia: Le parole composte dell’italiano nel quadro della Morfologia delle Costruzioni. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Micheli, M. S., & Štichauer, P. 2020. Sulla diacronia della composizione verbo-nominale in italiano. Linguistica Pragensia, 20 (1), 71–94. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mithun, M. 1984. The evolution of noun incorporation. Language, 60 (4), 847–894. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1986. On the nature of noun incorporation. Language, 62 (1), 32–37. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nielsen Whitehead, B. 2012. Pickpocket compounds from Latin to Romance. Doctoral Dissertation, Faculty of the Humanities, Leiden University.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Peša Matracki, I. 2006. Linee di tendenza nella formazione delle parole nell’italiano contemporaneo. Studia Romanica et Anglica Zagrabiensia, 511, 103–146.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Prati, A. 1931. Composti imperativi quali casati e soprannomi. Revue de Linguistique Romane, 71, 250–264.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Radimský, J. 2015. Noun+Noun Compounds in Italian: A corpus-based study. České Budějovice: Jihočeská univerzita.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rainer, F. 2008. Neo- and Neo-Latin. Word Structure, 1 (1), 53–64. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2009. Die Integration des lateinischen Kompositionstyps tauriformis im Französischen und Italienischen. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 125 (1), 45–84. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2017. On the origin of Italian adjectival colour compounds of the type grigioverde ‘grey-green’. In R. D’Alessandro, G. Iannàccaro, D. Passino & A. M. Thornton (Eds.), Di tutti i colori: Studi linguistici per Maria Grossmann, 247–256. Utrecht University Repository.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Renzi, L., & Salvi, G. 2010. Italiano antico. In R. Simone (Ed.), Enciclopedia dell’italiano. Roma: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani, [URL] (accessed: 03/03/2021).
Ricca, D. 2005. Al limite tra sintassi e morfologia: I composti aggettivali VN nell’italiano contemporaneo. In M. Grossmann & A. M. Thornton (Eds.), La formazione delle parole. Atti del XXXVII Congresso della Società di Linguistica Italiana (L’Aquila, 25–27 settembre 2003), 465–486. Roma: Bulzoni.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2010. Corpus data and theoretical implications: With special reference to Italian VN compounds. In S. Scalise & I. Vogel (Eds.), Cross-disciplinary Issues in Compounding, 237–254. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2015. Verb-noun compounds in Romance. In P. O. Müller, I. Ohnheiser, S. Olsen & F. Rainer (Eds.), Word-formation: An International Handbook of the Languages of Europe (Vol. 401), 688–707. Berlin: de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Scalise, S. 1984. Morfologia lessicale. Padova: Clesp.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Serianni, L. 1998. Lezioni di grammatica storica italiana. Roma: Bulzoni.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Štichauer, P. 2015a. La formazione delle parole in diacronia: Studi di morfologia derivazionale dell’italiano tra il Cinquecento e l’Ottocento. Prague: Karolinum Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2015b. The meaning of Italian VN compounds in a diachronic perspective: The development of a word-formation rule and its semantic instruction. In Proceedings of Mediterranean Morphology Meetings: Morphology and semantics, 138–142, Vol. 91.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2016. Verb-noun compounds in Italian from the 16th century onwards: An increasing exploitation of an available word-formation pattern. Morphology, 26 (2), 109–131. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Terreni, R. 2005. Composti N+N e sintassi: I tipi economici “lista nozze” e “notizia-curiosità”. In M. Grossmann & A. M. Thornton (Eds.), La formazione delle parole. Atti del XXXVII Congresso internazionale di studi della Società di Linguistica Italiana (L’Aquila, 25–27 settembre 2003), 521–546. Roma: Bulzoni.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Thornton, A. M. 1996. On some phenomena of prosodic morphology in Italian: Accorciamenti, hypocoristics and prosodic delimitation. Probus, 81, 81–112. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Todaro, G. 2017. Nomi (e aggettivi) che diventano verbi tramite prefissazione: Quel che resta della parasintesi. Doctoral Dissertation, Université Toulouse II – Jean Jaurès / Università degli studi di Roma Tre.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tollemache, F. 1945. Le parole composte nella lingua italiana. (Vol. 21). Roma: Edizioni Bores di N. Ruffolo.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Villoing, F. 2012. French compounds. Probus, 29–60. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wälchli, B. 2005. Co-compounds and natural coordination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zamboni, A. 1986. Considerazioni sull’it. «andirivieni» e sul relativo tipo composizionale. In K. Lichem, E. Mara & S. Knaller (Eds.), Parallela 2. Aspetti della sintassi dell’italiano contemporaneo. Atti del terzo incontro italo-austriaco di linguisti a Graz, 329–341. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1990. Premesse morfologiche e tipologiche del composto italiano «capinera», «pettirosso». In M. Berretta, P. Molinelli & A. Valentini (Eds), Parallela 4. Morfologia. Atti del V incontro italo-austriaco, 97–109. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue