On the argument status of Instruments in Italian

This study aims at discussing the semantic and syntactic status of Instruments in Italian and to account for their syntactic optionality. Our claim is that Instruments are not adjuncts; instead, semantically they are arguments/secondary participants and, syntactically, secondary complements. Their optionality is thus to be treated as an instance of argument omission, ruled by semantic recoverability: the more an Instrument is recoverable from the verb the more it is syntactically dropped. Our proposal, inspired by Pustejovsky’s classification of arguments, is supported by the analysis of three corpora of spoken Italian.