Coercing Italian: A Priming Experiment on Italian Valency Coercion

In Construction Grammar the basic units of language are constructions (henceforth: CXN), form-meaning pairs generally defined as “[a]ny linguistic pattern [...] as long as some aspect of its form or function is not strictly predictable from its component par ts or from other CXNs recognized to exist.” (Goldberg,2006:5). In other words, CXNs carry an independent and non-compositional semantic content, i.e. which cannot be (entirely) derived from the meaning of its parts. In addition, also regular and frequent f ormulations are entrenched and stored as CXNs. A very compelling argument for the idea that CXNs are symbolic units with independent and non-predictable meanings comes from the phenomenon of coercion.