Discontinuity as defocusing. A cognitive interpretation of the so-called discontinuous reciprocal constructions
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| Year of publication | 2011 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
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| Description | This paper focuses on discontinuous reciprocal constructions, i.e. reciprocal constructions in which one of the two pafticipants of a mutual relation ('to kiss', 'to many', etc.) is encoded as a grammatical subject controlling the agreement rn'ith the verb, while thc other one is expressed by means of a comitative prepo- sitional phrase ('with' + NP). Found in many languages, the discontinuous recip- rocals are aiso well attested in ltaiian (l), aiongside the simple reciprocal con- structions. Although reciprocai constructions have received a srcat deal of attention both in formal and functional literature, there is little regarding Italian recipro- cais and. in particuiar, a satisfactory anaiysis of the discontinuous construction is still lacking. My aim is to provide a semantic description of such consfiuction in Itaiian, comparing it with the sirrple one. More specificaliy, drawing upon the insights of cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1991; Kemmer i993) and tire find- ings of t1'pological investigations (Nedjalkov 2007: Kónig and Gast 200g), I u,.ill analyze diverse reciprocal events and their grammatical coding in Itaiian. On this basis, I wiii propose a semantic-pragmatic interpretation of discontinuous reciprocals, claiming that discontinuity represents a strategy of defocusing, which brings to the fore one parlicipant (the subject), u'hile backgrounding the other one (the comitative PP). |