“Stylish” similatives

In this contribution, we investigate two specific constructions with the lexical item ‘style’ that have developed similative uses. By looking at Russian v stile ‘in the style of’ and Italian (in) stile ‘(in) style’, we claim that the similarity mechanism that underlies these style -noun constructions does not depend on taxonomic relationships (as for type nouns) but rather relies on the context and knowledge shared by the interlocutors. In these constructions, the right-hand slot evokes a reference frame in which the left-hand element is inserted through similarity. Relying on corpus data, we analyze and compare the two constructions in terms of the mechanisms exploited to express similarity, the kind of similarity encoded, the grammaticalization pathway undergone by each construction, and the variety of functions they can perform. In addition, a comparative, contrastive analysis between the two languages allows to identify other functionally equivalent constructions that demonstrate the existence of a category of style -noun constructions.