L’analisi distribuzionale tra semantica e sintassi. Il caso dei sinonimi e degli antonimi

The paper investigates the relationship between syntax and semantics through the lens of Harris's Distributional Hypothesis, a framework revitalized by the success of Large Language Models. Focusing on the linguistic phenomena of synonymy and antonymy, the study analyzes the distributional profiles of five Italian predicative nouns. The methodology combines a traditional linguistic analysis of these terms within support verb constructions with a computational approach. The results indicate that terms sharing similar meanings often exhibit distinct syntactic behaviors and distributional frequencies, suggesting that "pure" synonymy is operationally rare. Ultimately, the study confirms that distributional analysis effectively bridges the gap between lexicon and syntax, demonstrating that a word's specific context reflects both its semantic nuance and its syntactic properties.