Constructing Judgments: The Interaction between Adjectives and Clausal Complements in Italian

This paper puts forward a corpus-based analysis of two constructions in Italian: “V + ADJ + infinitive clause” and “V + ADJ + che (‘that’) clause”. Some verbs, such as essere (‘be’) and sembrare (‘seem’) occur in both constructions; in addition, many adjectives can appear in the predicative complement position of both constructions. The che- clause and the infinitive construction are apparently semantically similar, both express- ing a judgment or an attitude (codified by the adjective) toward the content of the sub- ject clause. However, upon examining corpus data with a distinctive-collexeme analysis (Gries / Stefanowitsch 2004), subtle differences clearly emerge: the che-clause construc- tion tends to be associated with epistemic / evidential adjectives while the infinitive construction shows a stronger association with evaluative adjectives. As a result of the analysis, it can be stated that constructions appear to be characterized by a meaning (see Goldberg 2006), which can be influenced by lexical choices (adjectives, verbs, clitics).