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Axial Parts, Phi‐Features and Degrammaticalization: the Case of Italian Presso/Pressi in Diachrony
Author(s) -
Franco Ludovico
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
transactions of the philological society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.333
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1467-968X
pISSN - 0079-1636
DOI - 10.1111/1467-968x.12067
Subject(s) - linguistics , lexicon , history , noun , type (biology) , philosophy , geology , paleontology
In this paper, I will provide a possible syntactic characterization of (a subset) of so‐called degrammaticalization processes, based on the case of the diachronic evolution of presso/pressi (near/at, in) in Italian. Moreover, with an empirical study on the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano ( OVI ) corpus, I will support Svenonius's idea of Axial Part as an independent category in the lexicon (and not a mere spatial subset of relational nouns), providing a new kind of evidence i.e. of the diachronic type, to this claim.