lend · prestare

Places · who wears which marking

Treccani, Garzanti, Hoepli, and Sabatini-Coletti name a thing and a person in a, or a first-person dative clitic. They do not print Lender, Recipient, Theme, per qualche ora, and a interesse as five labeled sisters of one clause. The third-person clitics gli and le are constructed on the printed prestami. The return wording in the definitions is quoted and is not given an aspect label.

Marking map. One letter can belong to several heads. Read the head, then the marker.

• Subject of the Lender, and avere. The subject of prestare is the one who hands the thing over. Garzanti prints aus. avere and the compound ho prestato la borsa a mia madre. Olivetti’s conjugation table calls it a transitive verb of the first conjugation, auxiliary avere, and prints io ho prestato. Barron’s 501 Italian Verbs is the conjugation manual for that regular verb. No page of the manual is cited, and no sentence from it is quoted. The forms named here are Garzanti’s and Olivetti’s.
• Direct object of the Theme. Treccani’s un libro, la penna, la macchina, and cento euro are the thing handed over. Sabatini-Coletti’s direct argument is dei soldi. Garzanti’s is un libro, una penna, or la borsa. A sum in that slot is one object. It is not the rate. In ho prestato la borsa the participle stays prestato with the object following.
• Dative of the Recipient: a, or gli / le. The full phrase is a qualcuno (Treccani), a mia madre (Garzanti), a un amico (Sabatini-Coletti). The clitic of that phrase is printed as mi in prestami la penna and puoi prestarmi cento euro?. Gli is the masculine singular of that clitic, and le is the feminine singular. Neither third-person form is printed in the lend-sense lines read here. Gli presto il libro and Le presto il libro are constructed. A clause that writes both the clitic and the a-phrase is unprinted, and it is not ranked. Before an accusative clitic the dative has the shape glie- (glielo). That shape is unprinted as a line of prestare and is not a further argument.
• Borrow side, and the da-Source. Treccani prestito prints chiedere, prendere in p. (meno com. a p.) una matita and prendere in p. un libro. The thing is there. The person is not. WordReference’s government of English borrow something from someone is prendere in prestito [qlcs] da [qlcn], with Kathy ha preso in prestito una gonna da sua sorella da indossare alla festa. da sua sorella is the Source. The later da indossare in that line is a purpose infinitive, not a second source. in prestito and the less common a prestito are the noun’s preposition. They are not the Recipient’s a, and they are not the Source’s da. There is no Italian lemma that takes the borrower as subject the way emprunter, занять, or 借りる does.
• farsi prestare, one paragraph. WordReference lists farsi prestare [qlcs] as a reflexive for English intransitive borrow, and the line dovrà farseli prestare has no da. Langenscheidt’s translation of reflexive leihen is the frame farsi prestare qc da qn. The si is the clitic of analytic fare. The original Lender, the one who would have been the subject of prestare, is the da-phrase. That is a second event wrapped around prestare. It is not a second numeration of the verb, and it is not the French or Japanese lexical converse. The note on causative templates calls a productive outer wrap a second event. This page does not edit that note, and it does not treat Italian fare as Japanese derivational morphology.
• Duration. Treccani prints per qualche ora beside prestarmi la macchina. Argument versus adjunct is open. Nothing here is a claim about aspect. te li restituisco domani in the money line is a following clause. It is not a duration phrase of prestare.
• Terms, for money. Treccani: p. a titolo gratuito, p. a interesse, a usura, p. al dodici (al venti) per cento, p. su pegno, sopra ipoteca, a cambiale, p. sulla parola. Garzanti and Hoepli print a interesse and sulla parola. Hoepli also prints al cinque per cento. The money remains the direct object. The rate is one phrase beside it.
• prestare attenzione, aiuto, servizio. A separate group of senses. Treccani sense 2: p. attenzione, p. aiuto, soccorso, p. servizio, and also prestare orecchio, prestare fede, prestare giuramento. Hoepli glosses Prestare attenzione as stare attento, Prestare aiuto as aiutare, and Prestare servizio as being employed in a place. Sabatini-Coletti sense 2 is p. aiuto ai bisognosi and p. servizio in un luogo. There is no returnable Theme and no Recipient of that Theme. It is not the Appl_HAVE frame. The pronominal prestarsi on those pages is help or suitability (l’appartamento non si presta a stabilirvi un ufficio, Treccani; la plastica si presta a innumerevoli lavorazioni, Sabatini-Coletti). It is not the borrow side.
• dare in prestito, mutuare, dare a mutuo. Treccani’s gloss of sense 1 is already Dare in prestito. Langenscheidt pairs transitive leihen with prestare, dare in prestito. That periphrasis names the lend direction. It is not a page. Treccani mutuare is Ricevere o dare a mutuo, example m. una somma da una banca. The da there is the source of a sum, on a verb that prints both directions, and the entry marks the figurative use as almost prendere in prestito of ideas and words. Hoepli marks mutuare non com. and glosses it Prendere o dare a mutuo. Treccani mutuo prints dare, ricevere a m. These are the money contract. They are not the general lend lemma, and they are not pages. Treccani imprestare is Forma pop. per prestare, dare in prestito. It is another lend form, not a converse of borrow.
• Lend and rent are separate lemmas. affittare is the dwelling verb, and noleggiare is the movable, both noted on that page and not reopened here. Italian, like English, splits lend and rent. 貸す does not: the same lemma covers the returnable-theme transfer and the paid reading, and 賃貸する is the formal rent name on rent · 貸す. Langenscheidt puts noleggiare on leihen when the German side is against a fee, and prestare when it is not.

EN ⇄ IT valency strip

Each row lines up one English slot with its Italian slot. The alignment type says what happens to the slot: = (same status), shift (a bare English object ↔ an Italian dative), or a split of the subject’s direction. Dictionary lines come first. Every other Italian sentence is constructed, modelled on a printed line. They show the working alignment, not frequency, and not a bilingual corpus.

The strip below is a set of small multiples. Each card holds one frame, with English on top and Italian under it. The subject chip is the lender on prestare and the borrower on prendere in prestito. The fare card is the outer wrap. The attention card is the other sense.