Binary semantic features and syntax: the case of Italian

Focussing on Humanness and Animacy, this article shows how these mostly nominal categories influence the Italian causative construction with fare ‘make/have’ and the argument structures of a number of Italian verbs. Languages encode Animacy in different ways, sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly. The article illustrates the former case with Telugu and Japanese and argues that Italian functions differently, inasmuch as Animacy in Italian is rarely encoded in systematic ways. Furthermore, it is argued that the selectional restrictions a predicate exhibits actually reveal subtle syntactic phenomena only in cases of homonymy, i.e. when what apparently seems the same verb occurs in different constructs exhibiting distinct selectional restrictions (as well as different meanings, as in English with the resultative construction: He is spending us bankrupt). The article illustrates this phenomenon with the Italian verbs sapere ‘to know’ and mettere ‘to put’. Such grammatical contrasts shed light on the functioning of multipredicative syntactic structures.