Silent Instruments
Syntax, semantics, and acquisition of the instrumental role in Italian
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 24226841 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Alice Suozzi (Ca' Foscari University of Venice) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Publication date | 2026-03-26 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | BOOK |
| Venue | Silent Instruments (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | John Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL) |
| DOI | 10.1075/la.293 |
| OpenAlex | W7141611909 |
| ISBN | 9789027234209 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 215 |
This book offers the first systematic investigation of the instrumental role across syntax, semantics, and language acquisition. Focusing primarily on Italian within a comparative perspective, the book addresses a long-standing puzzle: why Instruments can be syntactically omitted even when they remain semantically present. Combining theoretical analysis with experimental evidence, corpus data, and innovative methodologies, the study redefines the status of Instruments with respect to the argument-adjunct distinction and introduces a new, principled account of their syntactic omission based on semantic recoverability. It proposes a refined typology of Instruments, grounded in verb meaning and contextual factors, and tests its predictions through behavioral experiments and large-scale corpus analyses. The book also breaks new ground in acquisition research, presenting the first experimental investigation of how Italian-speaking children acquire Instruments. The results reveal a striking dissociation between early syntactic mastery and the slower development of Instrument semantic recoverability, shedding new light on the acquisition of syntactically optional elements. By integrating syntax, semantics, and acquisition, Silent Instruments provides a robust and empirically grounded framework that is readily applicable to cross-linguistic research and to other phenomena at the syntax-semantics interface. It will be of interest to linguists working on argument structure, optionality, language acquisition, and experimental and corpus-based approaches to grammar.
argument structure · instrumental case · Italian · Language acquisition · syntax-semantics interface · verb semantics · Language Development and Disorders · Linguistic Studies and Language Acquisition · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
Argument Realization
Lexical Functional Grammar
The Generative Lexicon
Word Meaning and Montague Grammar
Intonation and Meaning
Transformational Grammar
Cognitive Linguistics
Phrase Structure in Natural Language
Prototypical Transitivity
Exploring the Syntax-Semantics Interface
Structure and Strategy in Learning to Talk
A cross-linguistic study of early lexical development
Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information
Redundancy and reduction
Acquiring and processing verb argument structure
Structure and Variation in Child Language
Audience Design in Meaning and Reference
Modeling the Influence of Thematic Fit (and Other Constraints) in On-line Sentence Comprehension
The effect of verb semantic class and verb frequency (entrenchment) on children’s and adults’ graded judgements of argument-structure overgeneralization errors
The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution.
The Logical Form of Action Sentences
Word lengths are optimized for efficient communication
The time-course of prediction in incremental sentence processing
The WaCky wide web
The Structural Sources of Verb Meanings
References in conversation between experts and novices.
Do young children have adult syntactic competence?
Logic and Conversation
Topic Continuity in Discourse
Pronouns in Germanic and Romance languages
Syntax
The Instrumental Case in English
What with? The Anatomy of a (Proto)-Role
Ingredients of Instrumental Meaning
Verbs describing routines facilitate object omission in English
The Information-Structural Status of Adjuncts
The acquisition of the clitic ci among typically developing Italian preschoolers
Infant-directed speech becomes less redundant as infants grow
A constructional account of genre-based argument omissions
Conditions on Chinese A-not-A questions
Vocabulary development in Italian children
The role of performance limitations in the acquisition of verb-argument structure
Toward mastery of Italian morphology
The acquisition of Italian morphology
Remarks on Lexical Structure and DRS Construction
Prosodic Characteristics of Early Multi-Word Utterances in Italian Children
Object associations of early-learned light and heavy English verbs
Why You Can’t Do So Into the Sink
A Canonical Approach to the Argument/Adjunct Distinction
Locative-Related Roles and the Argument-Adjunct Distinction in Balinese
Arguments and Adjuncts as Language-Particular Syntactic Categories and as Comparative Concepts
What’s New (and What’s Given) in the Theory of Focus
Pragmatically Controlled Zero Anaphora
Do We Need a Distinction between Arguments and Adjuncts? Evidence from Psycholinguistic Studies of Comprehension
Surface generalizations
Learning argument structure generalizations
Locality Constraints on the Interpretation of Roots
Prosody–Syntax Interaction in the Expression of Focus
Inferring Indirect Objects in Sentences
Deletion and proform reduction
Instruments as agents
The KEY to lexical semantic representations
Young children extend novel words at the basic level
Nonevent -er nominals
Force Dynamics in Language and Cognition
The Smooth Signal Redundancy Hypothesis
Categorization of Natural Objects
Distributional Models of Word Meaning
Radical Construction Grammar
Patient arguments of causative verbs can be omitted
Coercion in a general theory of argument selection
On the validity of the complement-adjunct distinction in valency grammar
A theory of focus interpretation
Distributional Structure
Very early parameter setting and the unique checking constraint
Disentangling sources of difficulty associated with the acquisition of accusative clitics in French
Clitic pronoun production as a measure of atypical language development in French
The development of an appreciation of specific linkages between linguistic and conceptual organization
Linguistic determinism and the part of speech
The case of the intransitive subject in Tsova-Tush (Batsbi)
Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in crosslinguistic studies
Canonical Typology, Suppletion, and Possible Words
Clitics and Particles
Thematic Proto-Roles and Argument Selection
Prosodic Structure in Young Children's Language Production
Prototypes Revisited
| Highly cited | No |
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