Meaning Extraction from Strappare Causatives in Italian

Abstract

The work targets a little-known causative construction of Italian whose causative verb is strappare ‘tear/extort/snatch’ (e.g. Ada strappò la confessione a Piero ‘Ada made Piero confess against his will’). In the active voice of this clause type, the subject, licensed by strappare, is invariably associated with the semantic role ‘Causer’ (as fare does in fare causatives, see [1]), whilst the post-verbal NP (e.g. confessione ‘confession’) is best analyzed as the predicate licensing the remaining syntactic function/s and the related semantic role/s. The NooJ grammar which the authors propose automatically extracts the meaning of strappare causatives by means of a novel type of semantic role. The latter is labeled as Cognate Semantic Role because its wording requires a verb whose content morpheme is the same as that of the predicate licensing arguments (e.g. confessare ‘to confess’). The indirect object licensed by the predicate noun is typically associated with a semantic role expressing an Agent. However, a few predicate nouns, e.g. vittoria ‘victory’, determine an unusual pairing between syntactic functions and semantic roles. Importantly, a distinction must be made between cognate semantic roles which are guaranteed by entailments and others which hold true on pragmatic grounds.