Language contact between Italian and English: a case study on nouns ending in the suffix -ing

Abstract

The article deals with how English deverbal nouns with the suffix -ing have been imported into Italian. The focus is on the semantic characteristics of these borrowed nouns in Italian and, in particular, on the question of whether they have been borrowed not as simple sign-concept pairings but with argument and event structure. In previous research, it has been claimed that argument and event structure need to be licensed by some overt functional element. Hence, borrowed deverbal nouns should have argument structure and event structure only if they have an overt affix, in other words, only if the forms are not borrowed holistically as unsegmented words but retain internal morphological structure, implying that morphological borrowing of the affix has occurred. When a foreign affix combines with native bases of the recipient language, this is often considered an important criterion for morphological borrowing, which is clearly not the case for the suffix -ing in Italian. Here, it will be shown that contrary to expectation, numerous occurrences with argument and event structure may be found in a large Italian web corpus for a sample of English deverbal nouns ending in -ing, borrowed into (certain registers) of Italian.