Semplessità: a Corpus-Based Study on Blending in Italian

In recent years, lexical blending, or simply blending, has captured the attention and curiosity of many authors, marking a significant gap with the past tradition in which it was simply referred to as an “oddity” or a “minor word formation process” (Aronoff 1976; Scalise 1984). Blends are similar to compounds, although in blending both constituents are fused to form new, often morphologically unanalysable lexemes (Bauer 1983; Beliaeva 2019). This study proposes an analysis of a corpus of 316 lexical blends collected from previous studies on blending in Italian. Each blend was double-checked in historical dictionaries (Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana or GDLI and Grande Dizionario Italiano dell’Uso or GRADIT) and/or neological databases (Osservatorio Neologico della Lingua Italiana and Dizionario di Neologismi Treccani) and then tagged with different labels. The phonological, morphosyntactic and semantic features of Italian blends in the corpus were analysed, in particular with regard to blending features such as: syllable length and stress position; lexical categories, structural types and series; semantic types and headedness. The study highlights some differences between Italian and English blends, as they seem to be subject to different structural constraints. However, there are also semantic similarities between the two categories, such as right-headedness, which in Italian contrasts with the left-headedness typical of compounding in Romance languages.