The book deals with the analysis of the expression of Grammatical Relations in spoken Italian verbless sentences. Unlike previous studies, this corpus-driven research aims at showing that it is possible to identify Grammatical-Relations in verbless sentences and that their encoding marks are non-canonical, as it occurs in verbal sentences which present non-prototypical arguments.
Moreover, it demonstrates that the spoken language is a privileged field of observation for the analysis of systemic grammatical phenomena which are not always evident in written language.
In verbless sentences, the Subject and Object are identified by the person marks expressed by the higher accessibility of their referents and the lexical semantic of NPs. In these structures, Grammatical Relations have the features of non-canonically encoded core arguments of some verbal sentences where the subject is less agentive.
Introduction - PART I GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS - 1 Grammatical Relations: definition and identification - 2 The Prototypical approach to Grammatical Relations - The coding properties of Grammatical Relations - The non-canonical encoding of Grammatical Relations - 5 Behavioural properties of Grammatical Relations - PART II VERBLESS SENTENCES - Definition of verbless sentences - 7 Verbless sentences with Noun Phrases in spoken Italian - 8 Grammatical Relations: from verbal to verbless sentences - 9 The expression of Grammatical Relations in verbless sentences - 10 Verbless sentences as strategies of attenuating agency - 11 Conclusions - References.
Carmela Sammarco is currently a researcher at the University of Salerno, where she teaches General Linguistics and Italian L2. She is a member of the laboratory P.A.R.O.L.E. (Analysis, Research, and Observation of European Languages) in the Department of Humanities. In 2021 she published with Miriam Voghera Ascoltare e parlare. Idee per la didattica, Firenze, Cesati.
