Nominalizations of property concepts: Evidence from Italian

This research aims to shed light on the poorly investigated issue of deadjectival nominalization, focusing on Italian and taking a corpus-based approach. The adopted framework is grounded in Croft’s Radical Construction Grammar, which considers lexical categories as constructions of pragmatic functions and semantic concepts; in Croft’s view, de-adjectival nouns are then references of property concepts, which however gives only a generic understanding of this type of construction. Radical Construction Grammar is then integrated with Malchukov’s perspective on nominalization, which describes the phenomenon as further articulated into the two parallel processes of the acquirement of nominal parameters and the loss of verbal parameters. The application of the elaborated framework to thousands of occurrences of Italian de-adjectival nouns sees the emergence of a series of grammatical patterns describing a number of minor lexical categories, which are found between the two major categories of Italian adjectives and nouns.