Costrutti locativi e non locativi con mettere

Abstract

Sentence (a) Ada mise Pio nel sacco is ambiguous: one of its meanings is literal (Ada put Pio in the sack), whereas the other is figurative (Ada fooled / outsmarted Pio). Such ambiguity is not present in sentence (b) Ada mise Pio in un sacco. On the surface, (b) differs from (a) only insofar as the indefinite article is employed, but conveys a literal meaning exclusively (Ada put Pio in a sack). The ambiguity of sentence (a) is derived from the existence of two constructions employing mettere. The prepositional phrase of one of them displays standard paradigmatic properties and conveys literal (i.e. locative) meaning, whereas the other has no locative value and is highly constrained (e.g. no substitution of the determiner, if any). The paper tests the hypothesis that sees the prepositional phrases of such constructions as predicative and mettere as a verb that does not license three arguments.