Tendenze della formazione delle parole nell'italiano contemporaneo: la composizione

Abstract

This paper analyses the principal tendencies of compounding, the most used word-formation process in Modern Italian. The goal is to delineate the most employed compositive patterns in the enrichment of the vocabulary of Italian. After a brief introduction, we will examine a productive compositive pattern of native compounding: N+N, V+N, A+A and N+A. Then, we will describe the two mostly employed patterns of non-native compounding: neoclassical compounding and what is known as "hybrid compounding". We will present examples from a corpus created from the dictionary of Italian neologisms (Adamo & Della Valle 2003). This choice is motivated by the idea that although neologisms are sometimes ephemeral, they can provide an insight of word-formation tendencies in Italian.