Coercing Italian: Psycholinguistic investigations on Italian Valency coercion

The present dissertation concerns the first in-depth experimental investigation of the linguistic phenomenon of valency coercion in Italian. The perspective taken for the question is rooted in the theoretical framework of (Cognitive) Construction Grammar (Goldberg, 1995, 2006; Hilpert, 2014), in which “coercion” refers to a mismatch between a lexical element and the construction in which it is embedded. In particular, valency coercion refers to the process in which the mismatching element is a verb, “coerced” by the general argument structure construction into a different meaning. Valency coercion phenomena have never been investigated for Italian; the aim of the present work is to – at least partially –fill this gap in the literature. The study of valency coercion phenomena is intended as a mean to investigate the cognitive reality of Italian constructions and to contribute to the understanding of how Italian argument constructions interact with the verbs with whom they can occur. An integraed approach of psycholinguistic and computational experimental methods is used in order to thoroughly investigate the phenomenon at hand.