Construction-based teaching of German verbless directives to Italian-speaking learners

German speakers have the possibility to use compact forms with adverbs (Germ. Hierher!, lit. ‘here to (me)’ or Italian Avanti!, lit. ‘Come in!’) or so-called “verbless directives” (Jacobs 2008), i.e. verb-free structures which express directive speech acts. Our paper deals with such verbless directives in detail. Because of their illocutionary force, verbless directives mainly appear in oral discourse or in written fictional texts which simulate oral speech. Because of their conciseness, verbless directives are favored by speakers and writers to trigger the realization of some intentions. Verbless directives have been described in various ways, depending on the syntactic theory. Goldberg’s usage-based, non-formalistic description of language (1995, 2006 and 2013) grounded in the cognitive tradition allows us to define verbless directives as entrenched and conventionalized form-meaning pairings, i.e. autonomous constructions with their own semantic, syntactic and pragmatic properties. A description of verbless directives is further interesting from a contrastive perspective. The article focuses on typological differences between the Germanic language German and the Romance languages French and Italian. But having described the differences between German verbless directives and their counterparts in Romance languages is no guarantee that learners will be able to use such constructions. For a more efficient learning of these constructions we developed a methodology inspired by studies on structural priming (among others Gries (2005), Hartsuiker et al. (2004), Loebell and Bock (2003) and Scheepers and Corley (2000)), which focuses on the learning of syntactic structures.