A contrastive study of constructions with the support verbs davat’/dat’ in russian and dare in italian

Support or light verb constructions, being idiosyncratic yet semiproductive, pose a real challenge for foreign language students. A contrastive study of light verb constructions in a first language and a target foreign language may be useful both for lexicographic and didactic purposes. This study deals with constructions formed by the support verb davat’ / dat’ ‘to give’ in Russian and the support verb dare ‘to give’ in Italian, with a noun in the direct object position. The constructions examined were extracted from the corpora ruTenTen11 and itTenTen16 available within the Sketch Engine software. The semantic and syntactic features of the constructions were determined by means of tests relevant to each language. Finally, productive semantic classes of nouns which can combine with the light verbs in question were identified and convergences and divergences between the constructions in the two languages established.