On Italian past participles with -issimo: The superlative of events between intensification and pluractionality

In Italian, past participles may form the absolute superlative by adding the same suffix as adjectives, i.e. -issimo. However, when used as superlatives, past participles may still occur in passive sentences to denote events rather than simple properties. The aim of this paper is to examine the semantics of past participles with -issimo by using corpora of written Italian. The discussion will show how the different aspectual features of verbs, which are connected with the type of scale structure of corresponding participles (Kennedy and McNally 2005), may influence the meaning of these forms as superlatives: with past participles taken from telic verbs and encoding a closed scale -issimo may have the same function as an endpoint-oriented degree modifier, by emphasizing that the final state expressed by the participle is reached; with past participles taken from atelic verbs and encoding an open scale -issimo may have the same scope as a scalar degree modifier, by denoting a high degree (not necessarily the apical degree). It will be further suggested that when -issimo is applied to past participles sometimes we may observe a shift from a pure intensive meaning to a pluractional meaning. In other words, superlative participles may denote an action intensified not only in terms of quality but also in terms of quantity, more precisely an action which is represented as distributed over an unspecified set of participants (distributive reading) and/or as repeated in time (habitual/iterative/frequentative reading).