The Inflection of Italian Pronominal Verbs

This paper describes the inflection of Italian Pronominal Verbs achieved by means of NooJ inflectional grammars. More specifically, this paper wants to show how a relatively small set of NooJ instructions can inflect more than 160 pure pronominal verbs, also representing a concrete starting point to parse any kind of pronominal verb (i.e. agglutination) obtained by means of syntactic transformations (i.e. pronominalization). Using a strict Lexicon-Grammar (LG) approach, we define as pure pronominal verbs all those verbs: • which do not have a non-pronominal infinitive, i.e. which are not transformations of transitive and/or intransitive verbs; • in which the agglutinated pronominal particle is not obtained by means of pronominalization, i.e. it does not stand for one or more arguments of a given verb. In this sense, we consider as pure pronominal a verb as inginocchiarsi (to kneel down) which is not derived from *inginocchiare and in which the –si has no semantic/transformational value. On the contrary, we do not consider as pure pronominal a verb as bruciarsi (to burn oneself, to burn each other), which is obtained pronominalizing the arguments of the transitive verb bruciare (to burn) used as an operator inside simple sentences as Max si brucia (Max burns himself) or Max e Paolo si bruciano a vicenda (Max and Paul burn each other). As a consequence of all this, and always from a LG point of view, it is possible to state that pure pronominal verbs must be lemmatized inside electronic dictionaries, and that therefore they need to be automatically inflected; on the contrary, all other pronominal verbs are not to be lemmatized inside electronic dictionaries. At any rate, as for automatic textual analysis, they can/must be recognized and parsed by means of expressively built NooJ syntactic grammars. In addition, we also note that the automatic inflection of pure pronominal verbs can be achieved only thanks to specific tools and instructions included in NooJ. In fact, from a morph-syntactic point of view, Italian pure pronominal verbs are simple words which, when inflected, become almost ever compound. In this sense it is crucial that while building an inflectional grammar, NooJ gives also the possibility to insert blanks between words, allowing the production of compound inflected forms. Therefore, starting from inginocchiarsi, it is possible to inflect as follows the first singular person of the present indicative in its unique allowed form: mi inginocchio (I kneel down) in which the occurrence of the personal complement pronoun mi is obligatory. It is worth stressing that all inflected forms of pure pronominal verbs present an obligatory occurrence of the personal complement pronouns, which as we will see change according to the different persons and numbers. This happens also with all those tenses, as for instance the gerund, for which the inflected forms are simple words: inginocchiandomi (while I kneel down) On the basis of such premises, we have built 29 inflectional grammars to inflect a dictionary of pure pronominal verbs composed by more than 160 entries. The resulting inflected dictionary has more than 27,000 entries.