Prepositional Phrases as Noun Modifiers

Abstract

Despite the growing interest of lexicological and lexicographical studies in frozen word combinations, some multiword lexemes are still partially unexplored. This paper focuses on a specific type of multiword lexical units: prepositional phrases functioning as noun modifiers (Multiword Adjectives - e.g. macchina a benzina, medico di turno, uomo in divisa, lavoro su commissione). Multiword Adjectives are extensively used in Italian and remarkably spread across Romance languages. The analysis is based on two main assumptions: i. this kind of lexemes can be analyzed only considering the simultaneous interaction of multiple levels of analysis; ii. the notion of multiword has a scalar nature and has to be modulated along a continuum of frozenness. On the one hand this study aims at showing that these sequences represent a large and very productive class of multiword lexemes, sharing the same functions of adjectives. On the other hand, this paper intends to show the morpho-syntactic, semantic and distributional properties of different classes of Multiword Adjectives, using data extracted from a corpus of written Italian language.