Linguistica Pragensia (Nov 2016)
Fenomeno della collocabilità ristretta nell’italiano di oggi
Abstract
There is a specific combinatorial periphery in any language consisting of words whose combinatorial potential is extremely restricted. These words, which are usually referred to as bound words, unique words, cranberry words or monocollocable words (MWs), belong to small and closed collocation paradigms, their number of collocates ranging from one to a few (usually ± 7). The present article tries to describe the phenomenon of monocollocability in Italian, basing the analysis on a list of Italian MWs extracted from corpora and contained in the book Language Periphery, Monocollocable Words in English, German, Italian and Czech (Čermák et al., 2016). Italian MWs and the fixed combinations in which they occur are analysed in terms of syntactic structures, semantic features, collocation structures and frequency. Monocollocability is a phenomenon subject to change in time: even though MWs are often considered to be “relicts of the past”, the collected data prove that progressive restriction of the combinatorial capacity of certain words can be observed in Present-Day Italian as well.
