Syntactic gradients in compounding: Bemba associative nominals vs. prepositional and deverbal compounds

In this article we compare three classes of nominal constructions: Bemba so-called ‘associative nominals’, a class of nominal constructions found in several Bantu languages (though we will essentially concentrate on Bemba), Italian so-called ‘prepositional compounds’ (or ‘phrasal compounds’), a class of nominal constructions common to other Romance languages (such as French and Spanish), and a specific class of prepositionless deverbal compounds that is peculiar to Italian and is not found in the other Romance languages.