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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Bene: Adverb or noun?

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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) Faresti bene a non dire niente ‘You would do well to say nothing about it’. We discuss dictionary discrepancies concerning the lexical category of bene in (a), which we take to be a noun predicate, and draw a distinction between the adverbial uses in (b) and (c).