The complementizer function of type-nouns in ad hoc concept construction: Evidence from Italian and Russian

The purpose of this study is to explore the semantic and pragmatic aspects of the complementizer function of type-nouns (cognates of type) in Italian and Russian and their role in the construction of ad hoc concepts. Italian tipo and Russian tipa have undergone a series of diachronic changes associated with semantic bleaching of their original taxonomic meaning and loss of morphosyntactic properties, followed by the development of non-nominal uses and functional meanings. Specifically, this paper presents and discusses a discourse instantiation of the abstract syntactic pattern [X (of) type (of) Y] shared both by Italian and Russian, whose semantic and pragmatic content can be summarized as follows: X and Y are chunks of discourse with varying degrees of syntactic complexity, involving single word forms, phrases, clauses, or fully-fledged sentences; X introduces a concept or a statement that requires further specification to become meaningful; Y provides additional information with respect to X; the type-noun behaves as a polyvalent complementizer, establishing an underspecified logical-semantic relation between X and Y and enhancing cohesion at the inter-clausal level. A theme that runs throughout the paper is the mechanism by which the pattern under study triggers the formation of ad hoc concepts, viewed from a Relevance-theoretic perspective. The principle of Relevance appears to provide an adequate explanation of why the speakers interpret, construct, and exploit the type-complementizer in discourse the way they do.