What Can You Give in Italian that You Can’t Give in Russian? A Contrastive Study of Constructions with the Light Verbs dare in Italian and davat’/dat’ in Russian

Light verb constructions (LVCs), which consist of a semantically reduced verb together with a noun (as the direct object or embedded in a prepositional phrase) conveying core lexical meaning to the combination, are widely used in both Russian and Italian. Contrastive research on LVCs in the two languages is practically non-existent. This study focuses on constructions formed by the Italian light verb dare ‘to give’ and the Russian light verb davat’/dat’ ‘to give’, with a noun in the function of the direct object. The Construction Grammar model (Goldberg 1995, 2006) and the notion of a family of constructions were adopted to account for relatedness of LVCs within each language. Productive systematic metaphors that license extensions from the basic sense of the verbs were identified and convergences and divergences between the constructions of the two languages were established.