BARE NOUN PHRASES IN ELLIPTICAL STRUCTURES OF THE ITALIAN LANGUAGE

Abstract

The basic theme of this paper are bare noun phrases, which in the Italian language often appear in reduced syntactic structures. Omitting redundant syntactic units is caused by several reasons, among which the most important are economy of language, emphasis and style. The occurrence of bare noun phrases in Italian often coincides with ellipsis, so we have paid special attention to the type of ellipsis (rhetorical and grammatical) where bare nouns appear, and to the types of verbs which is omitted in elliptical structure (verbal predicates, copulative verbs, semi-copulative verbs, existential verbs). We have analysed these reduced statements at the levels of surface as well as deep structures of sentences, relying on the principles of generative grammar and on modern structural methods. The survey results represent syntactic and semantic conditions as well as linguistic contexts, that cause SNØ in ellipsis.