Light Verb Constructions in Italian: A Corpus-based Analysis of 15th-17th-century Texts

This paper aims at analysing the structural and functional features of Light Verb Constructions in Italian. In particular, the investigation is devoted to the analysis of texts written between 1376 and 1691, extracted from the MIDIA corpus. Light Verb Constructions are an extensive subgroup of complex lexemes in Romance, including both Contemporary and Old Italian. From the structural point of view, Light Verb Constructions are made up of a Light Verb, i.e., a predicate lacking full referentiality, and a noun carrying the predicative meaning of the construction. Thus, in these sequences, the verb has a light semantic characterization, restricted to the functional features of verbal class (such as Tense Aspect Modality, and person traits), while the noun designates the action or the event. In the following, some instances of Italian Light Verb Constructions are shown (i.e., dare carico and dare forma in A, and avere bisogno in B): (A) diede carico ad uomini eccellenti di darle forma (he) ordered to men excellent to shape her “he ordered (lit. gave charge) to excellent men to shape (lit. give_her shape) her” (1589, ESP3_BOT_RAGI00) (B) Tutti abbian bisogno di poeti All (they) needed of poets “(they) all needed (lit. had need) poets” (mind-16th century, ESP3_AMM_DEDA00) This paper investigates a set of Light Verb Constructions in Italian texts of the 15th-17th centuries, which are extracted through the text mining tools included in the MIDIA corpus. As far as the structural analysis is concerned, Light Verb Constructions are classified according to (a) the kind of Light Verb used, (b) nouns they occur with, and (c) the selected argument structures. As for the functional analysis, the semantic shift beyond constructional meanings characterizing Light Verb Constructions is reconstructed.