The morphological expression of approximation: the emergingsimil- construction in Italian

Evaluative morphology is by now a well-establish domain in morphological studies (cf. Grandi & Körtvélyessy 2015, Grandi 2017), although not all the semantic functions performed by evaluatives are equally investigated: diminution, augmentation or intensification, for instance, have been subject to more extensive research than approximation or non-prototypicality. Italian has a number of ways to express approximation with morphological means, many of which appear to be prefixes or prefixoids, e.g.: