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Patterns of Nominal Infinitives. a Comparative Analysis of Italian and Spanish

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Patterns of Nominal Infinitives. a Comparative Analysis of Italian and Spanish Patterns of nominal infinitives. A comparative analysis of Italian and Spanish Federica Cominetti* & Valentina Piunno** 1. INTRODUCTION The appearance of the infinitive in nominal function is a well-known and well- studied phenomenon of Romance languages1. In many cases the infinitive is preceded by a determiner; such a feature is attested in the earlier stages as well as in contemporary stages of Romance languages. Nevertheless, the presence of the determiner is not obligatory: alongside determined infinitives, nominal bare infinitives may be found, namely infinitives used in nominal function and not preceded by any determiner. Compare examples (1) and (2) from Italian: (1) Dopo un’ora di questo girovagare tornammo indietro. After a hour of this wander.INF go.PST.1PL back ‘After one hour of this wandering we went back’. (2) Girovagare per Roma mi rilassa. wander.INF for Rome CL relax.PRS.3SG ‘Wandering around Rome relaxes me’. The data presented in this paper show that determined infinitives and bare infinitives are distinguished by clear distributional differences. If Gaeta (2002) has shown that the categories of derived verbal nouns and of nominal infinitives can be kept apart by virtue of different syntactic and semantic features, our suggestion is that determined infinitives and bare infinitives should as well be considered as two different strategies for the realization of Process Nouns. Furthermore, we intend to show the role played by different determiners in * Università Roma Tre. [email protected] ** Università Roma Tre. [email protected] The authors are extremely grateful to Raffaele Simone for his insightful comments to previous versions of the paper and to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. Responsibility for any errors lies solely with the authors. The article is the result of the close collaboration of the two authors. For academic purposes, though, Federica Cominetti bears the responsibility for Sections 2 and 5, and Valentina Piunno for Sections 6 and 7. Sections 1, 3, 4 and 8 were elaborated and written together. 1 Among others, cf. Skytte 1983, Vanvolsem 1983, Salvi 1985, Jansen et al. 2002, Simone 2003, Sleeman 2010, Egerland & Simone 2011 for Italian; Gross & Kiefer 1995, Simone 2004, Buridant 2005, 2008, Bidaud 2010, Sleeman 2010, Marzo - Umbreit 2013, Umbreit 2014, for French; Plann 1981, Miguel 1996, Bosque - Demonte 1999 for Spanish. See also Fabrizio 2015 for the features of the subject infinitive in Latin. Furthermore, the nominal infinitives is not only a Romance feature, but it is attested for instance in Germanic and Semitic languages (cf. Simone 2004, Alexiadou et al. 2011). 228 Federica Cominetti & Valentina Piunno conferring different distributional and semantic properties to the infinitives. Differently from English, where the gerund appearing in nominal function can only be preceded by the definite article the (Grimshaw 1990: 56), in Romance languages2 the nominal infinitive may indeed be preceded by the masculine singular forms of the articles – definite (i.e. IT: il, ES: el, FR: le) and indefinite (i.e. IT: un, ES: un, FR: un) –, and the demonstratives – proximal (IT: questo, ES: este, FR: ce), medial (just for Spanish: i.e. ese) and distal (IT: quel, ES: aquel, FR: ce) –. We intend to show that determined infinitives may keep verbal properties even when appearing in nominal function, or may exhibit features prototypically belonging to nouns. Accordingly, each type of determined infinitive can be located on different positions along the verb-noun continuum3. 2. THE VERB-NOUN CONTINUUM The long-time proposed conception of noun and verb as continuous categories explains the existence, in various languages, of nominals endowed with verbal properties, such as argument structure and aspectual values (Ross 1972, Grimshaw 1990, Sasse 2001, Simone & Pompei 2007). We will refer to these forms as Process Nouns. The encoding of Process Nouns is language-specific. Among the different strategies, we find both derivation (cf. for example the category of Action Nominals, Koptjevskaja-Tamm 1993) and the use of existing paradigm forms. Such paradigmatic sources may be found in diverse parts-of-speech: for example, Chinese uses classifiers for the realization of the Nouns of Once (Cominetti 2014, Cominetti & Simone 2017). However, the probably most spread strategy for the realization of Process Nouns – and especially the Nouns of Indefinite Process – is the use of non-finite verb forms, namely the gerund (English), the maṣdar (Arabic), the participle (Lithuanian, cf. Arkadiev 2014) and the infinitive (Romance languages). Many languages resort to more than one strategy for the realization of Process Nouns, leading to possible semantic overlapping between derivation and non- finite verb forms. Although meaning and function may overlap, the syntactic and semantic properties of derived verbal nouns are not the same as those of nominal infinitives (cf. Gaeta 2002: 38-39). In the following, we will suggest that bare nominal infinitives and determined nominal infinitives constitute as well two different strategies for the realization of Process Nouns, characterized by different degrees of verbal and nominal properties. 3. NOMINAL INFINITIVES IN THE DISCOURSE AND IN THE SYSTEM Much work on the nominal infinitives has been devoted to their long-time observed tendency to lexicalize4. This process produces nouns whose semantics 2 In this paper we will consider Italian and Spanish, beside a minor comparison with French. 3 Since we are interested in infinitives performing nominal function, we will not take into account the verbal uses of the infinitive, as for example in implicit subordinate clauses. 4 For Italian: Tekavčic 1972, Vanvolsem 1983, Skytte & Salvi 1991, Thornton 2004. For Spanish and French, cf. §6 and §7. .
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