Costruzioni a verbo supporto con nomi di parti del corpo in italiano antico e contemporaneo

This work aims at analysing a particular type of support verb constructions, namely those selecting a body part noun, e.g. prendere corpo, mettere bocca, mettere piede, dare una mano. Body part nouns differ from other nominal elements typically employed in support verb constructions, in that (i) they are not predictive, (ii) they are highly referential, although they may undergo semantic bleaching when they compare in a support verb construction. This paper proposes a corpus-based analysis of Old and Contemporary Italian support verb constructions employing body parts nouns. In particular, this analysis aims at verifying i) their semantic properties (e.g. the idiomatic meaning and the noun referentiality), ii) their syntactic properties (e.g. the argument structure and the coding of participants), iii) their syntagmatic properties (e.g. the syntagmatic configuration and the lexicalization degree of constructions).