Phd in DOCUMENTATION STUDIES, LINGUISTICS AND LITERATURE

Thesis title: L’espansione difettiva dei sostantivi russi e italiani: profili di lessicalizzazione

This dissertation contributes to the research devoted to the defective expansion of nouns in Russian and Italian, presenting the first corpus-driven, comparative and diachronic analysis of the phenomenon. The study is based on a multidimensional annotation of contexts ranging from the 18th to the 21st century, conducted initially on selected nouns and subsequently extended on a larger scale using computational methods. The interest in this phenomenon arises from the seemingly unmotivated existence of nouns lacking the singular form, which have been regarded either as a locus classicus of linguistic arbitrariness or as remnants of the derivational category of collectiveness. Despite numerous attempts, particularly within Russian linguistics, to reconstruct their historical development, no predictive model has yet been proposed to account for the modality and the cause of the organic defective expansion. Following an overview of relevant synchronic and diachronic studies, the empirical section begins with the construction of the first comprehensive dataset of lexicalized plurals in Russian and Italian, based on representative dictionaries. The analysis revealed cross-linguistic regularities in the semantic domain, especially in the lexicalization of “complex” events through metonymic shifts between singular and plural forms, and highlighted a substantial number of morphologically derived nouns, particularly in Russian, from adjectives and verbs via productive and long-standing suffixes. The multidimensional manual annotation method, which was termed Lexicalization Profiles, applied manually to eight selected paradigms, enabled the identification of a potentially predictive model of defective expansion, distinguishing two modes: paradigmatic and semantic expansion. The computational extension to a broader set of nouns confirmed morpho-semantic productivity in the lexicalization of complex events and a higher degree of polysemy in Italian nouns compared to Russian. A significant relation was observed between the number of senses and the paradigmatic expansion, which leads to morphological obsolescence. Ultimately, the organic expansion of defective nouns appears to depend on the frequency of individual senses and on the richness of the nouns’ polysemic network. These factors usually apply on derived nouns, reflecting a semantic coalescence between suffixal and inflectional meaning.