Chapter 7
The morphosyntactic interaction of kinship terms with evaluative
morphemes in Italian
In this final chapter, we address the interaction between
evaluative morphology and kinship terms introduced by possessives in
Italian, showing that the application of evaluative affixes influences the
syntactic context in which kinship terms can be employed: they cannot be
introduced by a bare determiner when evaluative morphemes attach to the
lexical root. We argue that this empirical observation has some clear
consequences from a theoretical viewpoint: the fact that derivational
morphemes, such as evaluatives, alter the syntactic environment in which a
noun is couched supports the theory of grammar advanced in Manzini and Savoia (2007, 2011), who
assume that Merge takes morphemes as its input and single morphemes are
fully visible to the syntactic computation.
Article outline
- 7.1The empirical facts and some theoretical background
- 7.2The morphosyntax of evaluatives: (Class)ifying predicates
- 7.3The interaction of kinship terms with evaluative morphemes: An
analysis
- 7.4Further issues on possessives, kinship terms and evaluatives
- 7.5Conclusion
-
Notes