Neosemies and “neosemies sui generis” registered in the Zingarelli vocabulary

Abstract

This article examines neosemies, which in the past, along with semantic neologisms, have been relegated to the margins of linguistic research, which has focused on syntactic neologisms (Cortelazzo 2000; Dardano 1993). Studying the entries under the letter “A” in some representative repertoires of neologisms, we found that neosemies are increasingly considered and cited by Adamo and Della Valle (2017) and Cardinale (2021).

From a theoretical point of view, authors such as De Mauro (2006), Lazzeroni (1998), Lombardi Vallauri (2010), Shukla and Connor-Linton (2008) have made important contributions to the analysis of neosemies and, more generally, to the semantic change of the lexicon. This theoretical approach inspired the construction of a corpus (Barbi 2018) derived from a lexicographic excavation of Zingarelli dictionary editions spanning almost half a century (1970-2015). Through this corpus, we identified numerous neosemies, which we quantitatively subdivided by some representative “labels” (Cannella 2010). The reuse of our corpus for the present study has highlighted some neosemies that refer to the target “colloquial” and are due to Coveri’s (1992) position. Furthermore, the analysis of our corpus allowed us to quantitatively observe the neosemies recorded with the labels “figurative” and “extensive”.

The present analysis also examines some “neosemies sui generis”, which correspond to meanings that are already in use but have only recently entered the vocabulary. This particular type of neosemy follows the position of Marri (2018). Some of these “neosemies sui generis” that we reported to the lexicographers of the Zingarelli dictionary have been included in the latest reprints of this dictionary.