Edited by Caterina Mauri, Ilaria Fiorentini and Eugenio Goria
[Studies in Language Companion Series 220] 2021
► pp. 211–238
This is a corpus driven study on verbless constructions (Cxs[ØVP]) in spoken Italian and French that have a textual naming function, namely verbless constructions that speakers use to name what they are going to talk about. This paper suggests that these constructions are tools that speakers use as structure’s mapping in the discourse to orient the listener and themselves and that build meta-discursive and meta-textual ad hoc categories. These structures are frequent in very high informative texts (i.e. meetings and conferences) and their occurrence correlates with the information’s density in texts.