Geschehensnominalprädikate im Gegenwartsitalienisch

The subject area of support verb constructions with nominal predicates depicting events, such as "La catastrofe si verificò alla presenza degli astanti inermi" and "La dimostrazione ha avuto luogo nella piazza del municipio", is one that has not yet been tackled in Italian linguistics. Support verb constructions with nominal predicates depicting events do not have an agent and nominal predicates, which are operators and can be nominalisations or simple nouns, arise in the canonical position of the subject. Nominal predicates depicting events can be classed into three main event object classes, <eventi casuali>, <eventi creati> and <eventi ciclici>, and other object subclasses forming semantic descriptors in Italian. In support verb constructions depicting events, nominal predicates belonging to specific semantic classes are actualized by certain determinants, support verbs and argument ranges. From our perspective, the word connection nominal predicate + support verb is considered a collocation and forms the semantic core of support verb constructions. In monolingual general-purpose Italian dictionaries collocations are usually not distinguished from other “phraseological units”. That is why support verb constructions with nominal predicates depicting events are also not recorded as such in the entries. Scientific and pedagogical Italian dictionaries do not make use of the concepts of support verb and object class for lexicographic purposes. The classification of nominal predicates depicting events suggested in the present paper demonstrates that object classes can be considered an appropriate model in the lexicographic praxis as they reduce polysemy in the lexicon. Classifying nominal predicates depicting events and representing for each operator a large number of semantic features and syntactic relations, provides a compact tool which enables us to reduce polysemy and represent lexicon extensively.