Article published in:
The Wealth and Breadth of Construction-Based Research
Edited by Timothy Colleman, Frank Brisard, Astrid De Wit, Renata Enghels, Nikos Koutsoukos, Tanja Mortelmans and María Sol Sansiñena
[Belgian Journal of Linguistics 34] 2020
► pp. 17–29

Constructional creativity in a Romance language

Valency coercion in Italian

| Aston University

The present contribution summarizes findings on the understudied area of Italian valency coercion – i. e. the interaction of verbs and argument structure constructions in novel and creative ways – from four different studies. It highlights their innovative character, theoretical significance, and crosslinguistic implications for Construction Grammar. The paper suggests that valency coercion resolution involve different phenomena, such as distributional properties of constructions and compatibility between verb and construction. Sociolinguistic factors such as age and diatopic variables are also suggested to be relevant.

Keywords: construction grammar, Italian, coercion, experimental linguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Valency coercion in English and Italian
  • 2.Experimental findings on valency coercion in Italian
    • 2.1Does valency coercion exist in Italian?
    • 2.2How much does construction semantics matter?
    • 2.3How much does verb compatibility matter?
    • 2.4Coercion and sociolinguistics
  • 3.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 May 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00031.bus
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