FEATURED NEOLOGISM:

The subordinate N+N compound “nonno vigile” (Eng. “vigilant grandpa”) is the neologism I choose, as I discovered it during a research project for my Ph.D. It is an Italian neologism that denotes “senior people who put their free time at the disposal of the city”, in particular, lending a hand in public places such as schools, parks, and so on. It is not easy to track the origin of this compound as I didn’t find any lexicographical data on dictionaries. However, looking at corpora the first occurrences of the compound can be found in the ItWac corpus (Baroni et al. 2009). There are oscillations between the inflection of both nouns (e.g. “nonn-i vigil-i”) or only of the left morphosyntactic head (“nonn-i vigil-e”). The feminine form is also possible (“nonn-a vigil-e”, “nonn-e vigil-i/e”).

I’m a word-formationist that studies the process of blending in Italian, although my research interest covers more broadly other issues related to both inflection and word-formation. Blending is an important source of lexical innovation, but many of them are hapaxes that lie on the bottom of (big) corpora. Some of them may eventually gain popularity and set their establishment in language usage. The diachronic trend of blends becoming neologisms is the aspect which connects me most crucially with all the ENEOLI research team. Another topic that drives my commitment into this research team is the analysis of trends in word formation. This allows to register changes in productivity of certain word formation process, as well as eventually new morphosyntactic and semantic peculiarities.