Diachronic trends in the formation of Italian deadjectival verbs

This chapter provides an overview of deadjectival verb formation in the history ofthe Italian language by outlining the productivity and comparing the semantics ofthe three available verbalising processes, namely, suffixation (chiaro ‘light, clear’> chiar-eggiare ‘clear up’), conversion (> chiar-ire ‘clarify’) and parasynthesis(>s-chiar-ire ‘lighten’). While in the early periods of the language history parasynthesis is the best attested process, from the mid-19th century on suffixation becomespredominant. Significantly, it is most commonly through suffixation that complexadjectives (and thus most of those of more recent formation) are verbalised. Likeparasynthesis, conversion, despite being well attested in the early stages, has seena marked decline in productivity, and is overall the least productive of the threeprocesses. Variation in productivity over time is also observed when comparingdifferent derivational patterns (e.g., different suffixes) within a single process. Thesemantic analysis of the derived verbs confirms that when adjectives are turnedinto verbs, this is mostly to express a change of state (‘make/become ADJ’), whichis the semantic space for which all three processes potentially compete. States andactivities (‘be/appear ADJ’, ‘behave in a ADJ’), on the other hand, are only encodedby suffixation and conversion, with a prevalence of the former. Parasynthesis isreserved for expressing change-of-state events, as well as for deriving the largestnumber of verbs expressing an inchoative meaning (‘become ADJ’) in the activeform, i.e., without the anticausative marker -si. Overall, this study allowed us toreconstruct the development of Italian deadjectival verbalisation over a wide timeframe, while also gaining insights into the factors that might have influenced itand possibly contribute to shaping current trends as well.