Syntactic discontinuous reduplication with antonymic pairs: a case study from Italian.

5 Functions of SDRA After presenting the main formal characteristics of SDRA, we now focus on the functions expressed by this pattern in Italian (cf. point [vi] in Section 3). Keywords: antonyms; Construction Grammar; discontinuity; Italian; reduplication EN antonyms Construction Grammar discontinuity Italian reduplication 315 345 31 01/18/22 20220101 NES 220101 1 Introduction Reduplication has been broadly investigated in both theoretical and typological studies (cf., among many others, [17]; [20]; [21]; [29]; [35]; [37]; [41]). As for the prototypical approach, the SDRA meets 5 criteria out of 8: more specifically, the SDRA does not conform to criteria v/vi (adjacency) and viii (wordhood of the whole construction). An advantage of a constructionist analysis to the SDRA is that we may account for the fact that the SDRA displays recurrent form-meaning associations: these can be analyzed quite straightforwardly as a network of related constructions motivated by a more general SDRA mother construction, to which they are linked via polysemous inheritance links. Finally, the SDRA displays a marked preference for the I di qua ~ di là i pair, whereas this pair is comparatively much less common than other pairs in the corresponding binomial version: if the SDRA were the unification of the reduplicative and the binomial constructions, we would expect the frequency of the pairs within the SDRA to mirror their frequency within the binomials. [Extracted from the article]