The morphosyntactic interaction of kinship terms with evaluative morphemes in Italian

Abstract

In this brief paper, we address the interaction between evaluative morphology and kinship terms introduced by possessives in Italian, showing that the application of evaluative affixes influences the syntactic context in which kinship terms can be employed: they cannot be introduced by a bare determiner when evaluative morphemes attach to the lexical root. We argue that this (trivial) empirical observation has some clear consequences from a theoretical viewpoint: the fact that derivational morphemes, such as evaluatives, alter the syntactic environment in which a noun is couched supports the theory of grammar advanced in Manzini and Savoia (2007, 2011), who assume that Merge takes morphemes as its input and single morphemes are fully visible to the syntactic computation.