When constructional choice is a matter of context: sembrare-constructions across a continuum of text genres

SEEM-verbs constructions, such as those with Italian sembrare ‘seem’, have been widely studied, with much of the research investigating the alternation between impersonal constructions with finite complementation, and personal (“raising”) constructions governing an infinitival clause. However, most of the studies on the matter seem to disregard the role of the extra-linguistic context of production in the choice between said alternants, even though in various languages there seems to be a strong variability between written and spoken situations (Davies 1997a, b; Cornillie 2007; Pisciotta 2023). The aim of this study is thus to evaluate the relevance of extra-linguistic context (operationalized as text genre), as opposed to linguistic factors, in the choice between mi sembra che ‘it seems to me that’, sembra che ‘it seems that’ and sembrare+infinitive in Italian. We do so by integrating a Construction Grammar perspective with studies on register variation and on orality and scripturality, adopting a point of view that decomposes written and spoken language in a continuum of text genres (Voghera 2017). A multifactorial analysis is carried out on 405 total occurrences of (mi) sembra che and sembrare+infinitive constructions, extracted from written and spoken Italian corpora, by fitting a Conditional Inference Tree. The results show that, at least for mi sembra che and sembrare+infinitive, the heaviest role in determining the choice of the constructions is played by the degree of dialogicity and planning of text genres, which are split by the model in three groups: conversational speech, an intermediate group consisting of fiction prose and monological speech, and non-fiction prose. Furthermore, data reveal that a continuum-based perspective on text genres allows us to interpret and to draw generalizations on the behaviour of sembrare-constructions. These results encourage us to take into account and to encode text genres in the description of constructions, even “traditional” and less idiosyncratic ones.