[Lingtyp] The type "la bellezza di cento euro"

[Malcolm Ross]

Dear Raffaele,

Constructions of this kind have played a role in the histories of some Oceanic Austronesian languages. See the attached paper.

—Malcolm 


Emeritus Professor Malcolm Ross FAHA | Linguistics, School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia & the Pacific | HC Coombs Building #9 | The Australian National University | Canberra ACT 0200 | Australia | CRICOS Provider #00120C


> On 31 May 2024, at 18:39, Raffaele Simone via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:
> 
> Dear colleagues and friends,
>  
> in Italian and other Romance languages there is a binominal NP structure as in the following examples:
>  
> italian
> Ho speso la bellezza di cento euro
> I have spent the beauty of one hundred euros
> “I spent a good one hundred euros”
> Ho pagato questa casa la miseria di centomila euro
> I have paid this house the misery of one hundred thousand euros. 
> “I paid a paltry one hundred thousand euros for this house”
> Ha sposato un tesoro di ragazzo
> She has married a treasure of boy
> “She married a darling boy”
> Faccio uno schifo di lavoro
> I do a crap of job
> “I have a crap job”
>  
>             The NP is structured as follows:
>  
> A specifier + N1, a sort of “Light Noun” indicating a positive or negative property (bellezza,tesoro, schifo ecc.) of N2 + di + N2, a noun representing the “semantic phrase head”, which the property indicated by N1 refers to.
>  
> From the predicative point of view, the quality attributed to N2 is not encoded by an adjective or sim. but is transferred to N1.
> Other constraints:
> a. the list of the possible N1 is very limited;
> b. some N1 (as bellezza in 1, miseria in 2) don’t indicate a property but refer to an amount, so working as indefinite quantifiers.
>  
> Could you indicate to me similar NP structures in other languages?
> Thanks.
>  
> Raffaele (Simone)
>  
> PS For Light Words, See Simone, R. & F. Masini. 2014. “On Light Nouns”. In Simone, R. & F. Masini (eds). Word Classes. 51-74. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
>  
> ==============
> Emeritus Professor, Università Roma Tre
> Hon C Lund University
> Membre de l'Académie Royale de Belgique
> Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de France
> Accademico (corrispondente) della Crusca
> Prix de l'Institut de France-Fondation Bonnefous 2022
> ===============
> Attività e pubblicazioni // Activity and publicationshttp://uniroma3.academia.edu/RaffaeleSimone
>  
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