Lingvisticæ Investigationes - Volume 33, Issue 1, 2010

This paper deals with adnominal autre in correlative structures (e.g. Pierre a suivi un autre chemin que Paul). In the first section, it is shown that this construction can be analysed as a case of relativisation. The subsequent sections propose a semantic-referential description of autre. The data suggest that the adjective functions as a negative operator, whose base meaning can be interpreted as a means of refuting an expectation. It is also concluded that this particular meaning, when combined with negation, enables the speaker to focalise the referent of the entity denoted by the complement, as “pas d’autre N que…” suggests a series of alternatives which are rejected in the same utterance (Cf. Pierre n’a pas d’autre solution que la fuite). Such a use could be interpreted as an emphatic version of adjectival seul

‘Part of’ and ‘kind of’ relations in the lexicon have been matter of some linguistic research, but strangely enough, they have only rarely been investigated together. Strangely, since ‘part of’ and ‘kind of’ appear to be similar in a number of respects, and since nouns such as furniture or bétail combine both ‘part of’ and ‘kind of’ readings. As a consequence, linguistic terminology in this specific domain has been lacking in uniformity and transparency. This article aims to bring terminological clarity: it offers a rough survey of the entire ‘part of/kind of’ spectrum and pleads for an unambiguous linguistic metalanguage that distinguishes between collective nouns (e.g. team), aggregate nouns (e.g. furniture), and superordinates (e.g. vehicle). Arguments for the terminological distinctions proposed can be found in a thorough investigation of lexical form-meaning relationships.

Conditional clauses in spoken Italian and other languages are often uttered with no main clause. It will be argued that in this case they constitute a construction in a technical sense, namely in the sense proposed by Simone (2006a), which is mainly reliant on the presence of specific pragmatic functions. The functions free conditionals actually cover are identified as the following: (1) posing a generic question of the type: what will happen? (2) making a statement to the effect that there is no point taking any action in the situation: there’s nothing we can/must do (3) acting as exclamatory rebuttal of what has just been stated: you are wrong! (4) making a request or offering to do something, (5) expressing desire. The syntactic and semantic features that make conditional clauses particularly suited to endorsing such functions are examined. The analysis conducted on a corpus of spoken Italian and extensive samples from other languages, both current and dead, contributes to the understanding of the steps whereby free conditionals move from high frequency in discourse to ultimately becoming an established construction.

It has been traditionally believed that the main characteristic of set phrases is precisely their fixed nature. This paper gathers the results of a thorough study of verbal set phrases in Spanish, which was developed to observe this feature and for which a database of 15,300 expressions was used. It is worth noticing that, even if these phrases are fixed to different degrees, a considerable amount of them allow modifications in some of their components which do not alter the global meaning.