A Syntactic Analysis of Italian Deverbal-Nouns

In this paper, I argue that in Italian de-verbal noun formation is a syntactic process due to the merger of a nominal head with a specific set of IP’s functional projections. Looking at the meaning of each de-verbal noun type and at the morphological properties of its verbal base, I determine the nature of the IP’s functional projections involved in the nominal formation. The main goal of the analysis is to show that that semantic and morphological differences across the large variety of Italian de-verbal nouns are reducible to syntactic differences.