When Italian bene ‘good / well’ occurs with fare ‘do / make’, several constructs with remarkably different argument frames are involved. This paper deals with three of them: (a) Il latte fa bene ai bambini ‘Milk is good for children’; (b) Fa bene il suo lavoro ‘She does her job well’, and (c)… read more
A parallel is drawn between two clause-types carrying an obligatory pro-form: wh-questions and the so-called free relative of pseudo-clefts. In the analysis both types are derived from a single counterpart which is structurally simpler. The constituent targeted in the former and focused in the… read more
This paper advances the idea that in German, Italian and English multi-word determiner phrases, termed Complex Nominal Determiners (CND), exist which are formed by at least a noun (N1) followed by a preposition ( von, di, of ). CNDs either quantify the referent of the noun they determine (N2) or… read more
Italian is the only major Romance language featuring a clause type exclusively devoted to expressing people's jobs. This type, the Job-fare-Construction (JFC), is constructed with a human subject and the verb fare 'do' followed by an obligatorily definite noun. The JFC has thus the appearance of a… read more