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Les prépositions complexes dans les langues romanes
Edited by Benjamin Fagard, José Pinto De Lima and Dejan Stosic
[Revue Romane 54:1] 2019
► pp. 141–175

Usage-based account of Italian Complex Prepositions denoting the Agent

 | Università Roma Tre
 | Università Roma Tre | UNINT
This paper takes into account a particular set of Italian Complex Prepositions signaling the agent of an action (e.g. da parte di ‘by’, a nome di ‘by’). Italian exhibits several types of complex prepositions revealing a different involvement of the Agent: in particular, these complex lexemes can introduce and distinguish the participants who (i) plan and intentionally conceive an action, (ii) perform it and/or (iii) have a coercive power over its performing.
The contribution aims to: (i) distinguish these Italian complex prepositions according to their functions, meanings, and the degree of involvement of the participant they introduce; (ii) analyze the collocational features and the syntactic environments where these lexemes occur; (iii) individuate possible correlations between their frequency of occurrence and the grammatical value; (iv) analyze their diachronic evolution across different historical phases; (v) put into relation the synchronic restrictions with the original syntactic environment within which the complex prepositions have been reanalyzed.
Keywords: Italian complex prepositions, Agent marking, diachronic analysis, grammaticalization
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1.State of the art
  • 2.Data collection and methodology
  • 3.Complex prepositions and classes of agenthood in Contemporary Italian
    • 3.1Contemporary Italian performer
    • 3.2Contemporary Italian animated instrumental
    • 3.3Contemporary Italian instigator and conceiver
  • 4.Diachronic Analysis
    • 4.1Old Italian performer
    • 4.2Old Italian animated instrumental
    • 4.3Old Italian conceiver and instigator
  • Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
  • Corpora and dictionaries
Published online: 22 July 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rro.00019.piu
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Corpora and dictionaries
Corpus La Repubblica: [URL]
Morfologia dell’Italiano in DIAcronia [URL]
Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini [URL]
Opera del Vocabolario Italiano [URL]
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