Proprietà morfo-sintattiche dei suffissi valutativi in italiano

This article addresses the morpho-syntactic behaviour of the evaluative suffixes in Italian. As we will see, investigating evaluative suffixes involves many descriptive and theoretical issues concerning the nature of morphological exponents in Romance languages. Our proposal is that both inflectional and derivational morphology in nouns are endowed with semantic content, and we provide evidence for their active involvement at the interpretive interface. We concentrate on the diminutive (Dim) -in- and the augmentative (Aug) -on-. Evaluatives express size properties or the grading of individuals with reference to physical or culturally-determined properties and can be understood as predicates that contribute to restricting the argumental variable of the root.