Listing between lexicon and syntax: focus on frame-naming lists

Abstract

The goal of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, we advocate the view that ‘listing’ (Masini et al. this issue) is a cross-level mechanism with cognitive grounding that manifests itself in various ways along the lexicon-syntax continuum. Indeed, we claim that some linguistic objects pertaining to the morphological and lexical level (as e.g. coordinating compounds, reduplications, (ir)reversible binomials) are structurally and functionally similar to freely created syntactic lists. On the other hand, we analyze a so far underdescribed type of lists in-between lexicon and syntax. Lists are often seen as instances of 'natural coordination' (Walchli 2005) where the conjuncts are lexico-semantically related; however, there are lists where the conjuncts are, rather, frame-related, i.e., by virtue of occurring in a list, they either evoke or build a frame, which may be either established or context-dependent. In this respect, we present two corpus-based case-studies from Italian concerning the V1+and+V2 construction (e.g. 'gratta e sosta' ‘scratch and park ticket’, lit. ‘scratch and park’) and he all+list construction (e.g. 'tutto casa e chiesa' ‘pious, churchy’, lit. ‘all home and church’). We discuss and analyze our data with the tools of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995, 2006) and Construction Morphology (Booij 2010)