Disculpa Rodrigo, però això no és veritat.
I’m the one who should apologize for giving wrong information. I took what Treccani says in the
Nominalizzazioni entry and mistakenly generalized it to all cases of
dare/fare una -ata:
Spesso i nomi in -
ata danno luogo a perifrasi verbali con ➔
verbi supporto(
dare,
fare, ecc.) semanticamente vuoti:
tale perifrasi è «una variante del verbo transitivo corrispondente che sottolinea la brevità, l’occasionalità dell’azione» (Salvi 1988: 81; Simone 2003):
(18)
farsi una dormita, una bevuta, una mangiata, una scopata, una cacata, una passeggiata
(19) dare un’ordinata alla casa, una letta a un giornale
Nonetheless, I took the time to check the meaning of some specific examples of this construction, like
dare una letta, dare una guardata and
dare una lavata, which really do mean “to have a quick read”, “to have a quick look” and “to give a quick wash”.
Al meu parer depèn una mica de la intenció del parlant. En principi, no té per què indicar menys temps o certa superficialitat. La diferència rau en el fet que mencionem l'acte en la seva totalitat, és a dir, hi ha una èmfasi en el procés.
Thanks, Penyafort. I think I’m starting to get it. Maybe I should have explained a bit more about what originally got me interested in this topic.
On the Portuguese forum, our Portuguese friends explained that deverbal nouns ending in -
adela don’t necessarily refer to a single, brief, or superficial action. Sometimes they can simply mean the act itself. That surprised me, because -
adela is the diminutive form of the suffix -
ada, which also has another diminutive form, -
adinha. That one is much more common in Brazilian Portuguese, and the diminutive tends to emphasize the punctual, brief, or superficial nature that deverbal nouns in -
ada already tend to have in the construction
dar uma -ada.
So I started looking into it and found that Spanish and Italian have the same kind of construction, although they can use other verbs besides
dar and
dare. And quite often, the construction does seem to emphasize the fact that the action is punctual, brief, or superficial.
Then I checked Catalan and found that it has the construction too, with
donar and
fer. But I found it much harder to tell exactly what these constructions mean in Catalan—whether they simply refer to the act itself, or whether they also somehow indicate something about the nature of the act. The only deverbal noun I came across that seemed to clearly indicate the kind of action was
ullada, which means
a quick look.
I remembered, though, that I'd already asked a similar question about Spanish on
Sólo español, and, although most of the respondents simply confirmed that
dar una leída means the same as
to have a quick read, Rocko gave me a different answer, one which applies just as well to Brazilian Portuguese for the same reasons:
Antes de decir lo que entiendo al leer la frase de ejemplo, quiero dejar claro que para mí el significado de “dar una leída” varía según el tono de voz y las intenciones que uno puede percibir o captar. Si se dice con tono sincero, grave, pausado y de genuino interés, significaría “lo voy a revisar”, pero cuando se dice “a la ligera”, con tono de voz normal, rápido y casi como para salir del paso (promesas vacías), entonces entiendo “después le dedicaré unos minutos para encontrar la parte importante del texto” (no leer todo con mucha atención, únicamente buscando enterarse del meollo del asunto).
So, even in Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish, where
dar uma -ada and
dar/echar una -ada very often seem to convey the idea of a brief, one-off, or superficial action, context matters when it comes to determining the meaning of the expression. From what you’ve told me, in Catalan,
donar/fer una -ada can sometimes refer to a brief, one-off, or superficial action, but that isn’t really the default meaning, as it is in Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish and, with many deverbal nouns, though not all of them, in Italian as well. Have I understood it correctly?