Talk:a causa di

RFM discussion: June–July 2020

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for moves, mergers and splits (permalink).

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a causa di

Should be moved to a causa. The di is not strictly necessary for this locution, because constructions like "a causa sua" ("because of him") are completely possible (and very common). Imetsia (talk) 15:58, 14 June 2020 (UTC)

On second thought, I withdraw this request for moving the page. There are many Italian entries (as well as many English ones) that attach the di (or, in the case of English, "of") even when not strictly necessary. (This occurs in cases, like this one, where one could use a possessive pronoun instead). Many Italian dictionaries do the same, so there's no need to move this entry. Imetsia (talk) 00:16, 28 June 2020 (UTC)

@Imetsia: Yes, I would keep this as is, though not for the same reason. In French, I always lemmatize such cases with the preposition de, even though when the object of the preposition is a personal pronoun, the prepositional phrase de + pronoun automatically switches to a possessive determiner: "à l'intention de quelqu'un" becomes "à mon intention" if that quelqu'un is moi. To me, the preposition de is "absorbed" in the possessive determiner mon, but it's still there in a way: both the possessive determiner and the prepositional phrase introduced by de function as genitives.

However, I wonder why this doesn't always happen: "à cause de moi" doesn't become "à ma cause". PUC – 10:59, 29 June 2020 (UTC)

I think it's because "de" can be both a preposition meaning "of/from" and a genitive marker. When it's purely a preposition, it can't be turned into a possessive. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 03:11, 27 July 2020 (UTC)