Nominalizations of property concepts: Evidence from Italian

The research deals with what has been traditionally referred as ‘de-adjectival nominalization’, or the linguistic phenomenon turning adjectives, such as Italian nero ‘black’ or bello ‘ beautiful’, into nouns: nero ‘black (n.)’, bellezza ‘beauty’ or i belli ‘the beautiful (people)’. By drawing on corpus data, the aim of this study is to investigate in Italian how the mismatch between the semantic class of properties and the pragmatic function of reference accounts for a series of constructions of property nominalizations, each characterized by a specific strategy, a set of grammatical parameters and meaning.