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

Fri May 31 10:46:58 UTC 2024

Dear colleagues:

I find it useful to distinguish between two types of constructions.

The one illustrated by Raffaele, Guillaume and Cat is what Foolen (2004) 
calls /Expressive Binominal Constructions./  These are pragmatically 
marked, in being expressive and tend to have a normal/neutral 
alternative (a horrible talk, a darling boy, ...). They also normally 
have specific reference. The qualifying noun in the construction tends 
to be entity-denoting, rather than quality-denoting (but this seems not 
to be the case in the Japhug examples, and in the belleza example from 
Italian): trainwreck, whopper, crook, tesoro, schifo ...

On the other hand, there exist pragmatically neutral constructions for 
adnominal qualification in which the semantic qualifier is construed as 
the head of a genitive construction. This is what Malchukov calls 
/Dependency Reversal in Noun-Attribute/ (DRNA) constructions and what 
Ross (1998) calls /Possessive-Like Attribute Constructions/. I prefer 
the term */Possessee-like qualifier constructions/* for being more 
accurate (more precise than DRNA, and excluding constructions such as /a 
thing of beauty/, which are also possessive-like). In the Bantu language 
Eton [eto], which does not have adjectives, Possessee-like qualifiers 
are the only strategy available for adnominal qualification. Their head 
noun can be a regular noun or be dedicated to this construction, as the 
qualifying noun /ɛ̀bə̀ŋ/ 'beautiful' in the following example.

ɛ̀bə̀ŋ ɛ́ lôŋ

ɛ̀-bɛ̀ŋɛ́=lòŋ

5-beauty5.gen=[5]hair

‘beautiful hair’

Best wishes,

Mark

references:

Foolen, Ad (2004). Expressive binominal NPs in Germanic and Romance. In: 
Radden, Gunther & Klaus-Uwe Panther (eds.) Studies in Linguistic 
Motivation. Berlin. Mouton de Gruyter.

Ross, Malcolm (1998). Possessive-like attribute constructions in the 
Oceanic languages of northwest Melanesia. In: Oceanic Linguistics 37–2: 
234–276.

Van de Velde, Mark L.O. (2008). A Grammar of Eton. Berlin: Mouton de 
Gruyter.

Van de Velde, Mark L.O. (2012). The origin and spread of possessee-like 
qualifiers in Central Africa 
<https://mark.vandevelde.cnrs.fr/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Van_de_Velde_2012_Buea_handout_Possessee-like-qualifiers.pdf>. 
Buea. 7/th World Congress of African Languages./

On 31/05/2024 11:48, Sergey Say via Lingtyp wrote:
> Dear Rafaelle,
>
> The following book is an excellent resource on the types of 
> constructions you are interested in.
>
> Malchukov, Andrej L. 2000. Dependency reversal in noun-attribute 
> constructions: towards a typology. (Lincom studies in Language 
> Typology, 3). München: LINCOM EUROPA.
>
> Best,
>
> Sergey Say*
> *
>
> On Friday, May 31, 2024 at 10:39:32 AM GMT+2, 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
>
>  1. Ho speso _la bellezza_ di cento euro
>
> I have spent _the beauty_ of one hundred euros
>
> “I spent a good one hundred euros”
>
>  2. 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”
>
>  3. Ha sposato _un tesoro_ di ragazzo
>
> She has married _a treasure_ of boy
>
> “She married a darling boy”
>
>  4. 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 publications 
> http://uniroma3.academia.edu/RaffaeleSimone 
> <http://uniroma3.academia.edu/RaffaeleSimone>
>
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