Quel genio di lingua. Analisi quantitativa e qualitativa delle costruzioni fraseologiche valutative dell’italiano e confronto con lo spagnolo e il francese

This article aims at analysing evaluative phraseological constructions (e.g. IT quel tesoro di mio figlio ‘my very dear son’, lit. “that treasure of my son”), whose structure is only partially filled with lexical units. Evaluative phraseological constructions include both fixed and variable slots. The first variable position (Noun1) indicates a quality, while the second variable slot (Noun2) represents the entity to which this quality is attributed. On a semantic level, the construction has an attributive value. It conveys an intensified evaluative meaning, which varies according to the semantics of the nouns. Evaluative phraseological constructions occur in different languages of the Romance group. Through the analysis of data extracted from corpora, the work aims at identifying the different types of structures associated with this pattern and their properties on a quantitative and qualitative level, ii) classifying the sequences on the basis of semantic and functional criteria, iii) comparing the construction among some languages of the Romance group.