SEMANTICS IN THE DERIVATIONAL MORPHOLOGY OF ITALIAN - IMPLICATIONS FOR THE STRUCTURE OF THE LEXICON

This study surveys some exemplary patterns of word derivation in Itali an and attempts to integrate them into a theory of derivational semant ics using a formal linguistic model, specifically LFG. After a brief e xposition of the theoretical dilemmas posed by derivational semantics, we present some detailed data from Italian to illustrate the range of phenomena that need to be accounted for. After classifying some of th ese data according to the semantic operations they invoke, we present an extension to the LFG model of sentence processing that permits a fo rmal account of derivational semantics in sentence processing.