Abstract
The work targets a little-known causative construction of Italian whose causative verb is strappare ‘tear/extort/snatch’ (e.g. Ada strappò la confessione a Piero ‘Ada made Piero confess against his will’). In the active voice of this clause type, the subject, licensed by strappare, is invariably associated with the semantic role ‘Causer’ (as fare does in fare causatives, see [1]), whilst the post-verbal NP (e.g. confessione ‘confession’) is best analyzed as the predicate licensing the remaining syntactic function/s and the related semantic role/s. The NooJ grammar which the authors propose automatically extracts the meaning of strappare causatives by means of a novel type of semantic role. The latter is labeled as Cognate Semantic Role because its wording requires a verb whose content morpheme is the same as that of the predicate licensing arguments (e.g. confessare ‘to confess’). The indirect object licensed by the predicate noun is typically associated with a semantic role expressing an Agent. However, a few predicate nouns, e.g. vittoria ‘victory’, determine an unusual pairing between syntactic functions and semantic roles. Importantly, a distinction must be made between cognate semantic roles which are guaranteed by entailments and others which hold true on pragmatic grounds.
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Notes
- 1.
The word cognate is used as researchers do either in diachronic linguistics (e.g. Latin MŬSCA ‘fly’ and Italian mosca are etymologically related, and therefore are cognate words) or with the so-called ‘cognate objects’ (figura etymologica).
- 2.
In strappare causatives such as (5), the verb cognate to the predicative N1 is transitive. As a transitive predicate, applaudire (as well as the cognate applauso) can therefore assign two semantic roles: (i) >chi applaude< ‘s|he who applauds’ and (ii) >chi è applaudito< ‘s|he who is applauded’ (notice that for the wording of such roles the active voice is employed for the former role, whilst the latter requires the passive voice). In (5), the semantic role (i) is predictably present, unlike the other, which is not included. In the most common interpretation of (5), the semantic role (ii) does apply to N0, the subject, and therefore l’artista ‘the artist’ is not only >s|he who brings about the applauding<, but also > s|he who is applauded<. The reason motivating the absence in (5) of the role in (ii) above is the following: whilst the semantic role paired to the indirect object is logically entailed (thus, if (5) is true, the sentence The boys are those who applaud must also be true), the role in (ii) is not, although this unit of meaning is normally assigned on pragmatic grounds (see e.g. Fig. 5). Indeed, the following variant of (5) is unlikely but possible: L’artista strappò un applauso per il proprio collega ‘The artist managed to get a round of applause for his own colleague’. This point will be addressed again in Sect. 5.
- 3.
The noun applauso and the cognate verb applaudire illustrate a frequent case of allomorphy in Italian.
- 4.
Most of these nouns come from a research conducted on the Itwac corpus of SketchEngine (see [2]).
- 5.
This semantic representation does not capture the difference in meaning between the sentence with applauso and that with ovazione.
- 6.
Not to be confused with the homonyms meaning ‘vow’ and ‘ballot’.
- 7.
The same type of inversion takes place in the so-called constructions converses ([20]), for example in John rilasciò un’intervista al giornalista ‘John gave an interview to the reporter’. For our purposes, the following difference is noteworthy: in John fece un’intervista al giornalista ‘John interviewed the reporter’, a support verb construction, the indirect object is to be associated with the cognate semantic role >he who is interviewed< (in the passive voice), whilst in John rilasciò un’intervista al giornalista the indirect object is associated with the semantic role >he who interviews< (in the active voice).
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Mirto, I.M., Monteleone, M. (2021). Meaning Extraction from Strappare Causatives in Italian. In: Bigey, M., Richeton, A., Silberztein, M., Thomas, I. (eds) Formalizing Natural Languages: Applications to Natural Language Processing and Digital Humanities. NooJ 2021. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1520. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92861-2_18
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