Search results for " argument structure"

Changes of meaning due to changes of articles: A study of singular count nouns in post-verbal position in Italian

2009

'Essi fecero un muro' vs. 'Essi fecero muro': on the surface, these Italian sentences differ only for the presence of an article before the post-verbal noun (PVN) 'muro', literally 'wall'. Despite this minor divergence, their VPs vary greatly in meaning: the former can be rendered as 'They built a wall', the latter as 'They put up resistance'. In Italian, many other nouns behave as 'muro' does above. The meanings come from distinct structures: PVNs preceded by an article are direct objects. Bare PVNs, at times the very same noun, can either pass tests for direct object-hood or show distinct syntactic ties with the verb.

Costrutti locativi e non locativi con mettere

2013

Sentence (a) Ada mise Pio nel sacco is ambiguous: one of its meanings is literal (Ada put Pio in the sack), whereas the other is figurative (Ada fooled / outsmarted Pio). Such ambiguity is not present in sentence (b) Ada mise Pio in un sacco. On the surface, (b) differs from (a) only insofar as the indefinite article is employed, but conveys a literal meaning exclusively (Ada put Pio in a sack). The ambiguity of sentence (a) is derived from the existence of two constructions employing mettere. The prepositional phrase of one of them displays standard paradigmatic properties and conveys literal (i.e. locative) meaning, whereas the other has no locative value and is highly constrained (e.g. n…

Interrogatives et pseudo-clivées : un parallèle

2009