NooJ Grammars for Morphophonemic Continuity and Semantic Discontinuity

If we give someone just one slap, are we actually slapping him or her? More precisely: how many slaps must we give someone so to mean that we are concretely slapping him or her? These two questions seem quite odd and too much driven by “semantic subtleties”, especially if we bear in mind all Lexicon-Grammar (LG) [1] studies on sentence transformations relating predicative nouns to verbs [2–12], that is nouns as schiaffo (slap) to verbs as schiaffeggiare (to slap). As is well known, these transformations almost never lead to perfect semantic equivalence. This is evident also with the couple passeggiata (walk) and passeggiare (to walk), in the Italian sentences Max fa una passeggiata (Max takes a walk, support verb) vs. Max passeggia (Max walks, regular verb). Actually, the previous support verb sentence does not imply the same not–finite verbal action as the regular verb sentence, in which the derivative suffix -eggi in passeggiare refers to a reiterated and iterative action. Besides, concerning the lacking of perfect equivalence between these types of sentences, the aforementioned noun schiaffo seems to pose additional problems, together with a series of other nouns semantically contiguous to it and that express the action of “hitting someone with a part of the body or with an object, be it itemized or not”. In this case, we refer to nouns such as bastonata (blow struck with a stick), botta (hit), calcio (kick), gomitata (elbow hit), and similar.