Parasynthetic verbs in Spanish and their equivalents in Italian: symmetries, correspondences and theoretical implications

Verb formation has been particularly neglected in Spanish-Italian contrastive grammar. In a contrastive vein, the present study tackles parasynthetic verb formation in Spanish and Italian. The corpus is composed of 650 items. The analysis reveals the asymmetries, symmetries, and correspondences between both languages. The establishment of equivalences may be useful in applied fields such as the teaching of Spanish as Foreign Language to Italian speaking students. However, the present study assumes the compositional meaning of parasynthetic formations and advances the hypothesis that more symmetric formations will be documented in both languages as the parasynthetic verb denotes a change of state. It contributes, thus, to further explore the theoretical aspects of parasynthesis.