Italian Verb-Adverbial Particle Constructions

Abstract

This paper uses both a Predication Theory and syntactic-semantic analysis in an examination of the Italian Verb-Adverbial Particle Constructions (referred to as V-AdvPCs) of the idiomatic type such as buttare giù una lettera “to write down a letter” and mandare avanti un’azienda “to carry on a business”. I provided here — within the Lexicon-Grammar framework (Gross M., 1981, 1996, 1998; Elia, A. 2013) and Operator-Arguments Grammar (Harris Z., 1976, 1978, 1988) — a new reading of the predicative structure of Italian idiomatic V-AdvPCs arguing that they can be split into different syntactic types on the basis of two main issues: the predicative element of the constructions (the so-called ‘operator’ in Harris’s theory) and the pattern of variation which they exhibit. The descriptive study carried out here is based on a lexicon-grammar database of 300 idiomatic V-AdvPCs with N0 V AdvPart N1 sentence structure.