The Covid-19 Pandemic, 2020-2023

Word Formation, Borrowing, and Their Interaction in Italian

Abstract

The present paper provides a qualitative investigation into the semantics of Italian Covid-19 terms, with special attention to complex constructs that are the outcomes of contact with English in Italian foreign word formation (Iacobini 2015), and are formed with Covid and corona as first or second constituent. Related questions concern the effects of matter borrowing (i.e. borrowing of individual lexical units [Ten Hacken and Panocová 2020a, 2020b]) onto Italian word formation. That is, the reinforcing effect that new foreign word formations in analogue pairs and sets of analogues might have on specific native or foreign Italian word formation patterns and schemas. The findings return an extremely varied picture. Roughly, the analysis demonstrates the general adherence of Italian to the Left-Hand Head Rule principle in case of Adjective-Noun and Noun-Noun constructs, e.g. tassa Covid, a classificatory noun and a pseudo-Anglicism, vis-à-vis English Covid tax. Second, Anglicisms increase contact with right-headed word formations in Italian, and local analogy can be established with earlier Anglicisms, based on formal similarity, and with an identical second element, e.g. the semantic pseudo-Anglicism Covid Tax, a Name, possibly formed after English Tobin Tax. Luxury loans—or, according to Öhmann’s (1961) canonical definition, borrowings that can be considered semantic equivalents of words in the receiving language—are another way to reinforce contact with Anglicisms and awareness of mirror structures, e.g. green pass, a pseudo-Anglicism, and the hybrids Covid pass and pass Covid. Third, reinforcing effects can be observed for specifications of [Prep-N]A,N and [Adv-N]A,N schemas—as in non-Covid.N ‘anti-Covid vaxxer,’ a hybrid, and no-Covid.N ‘anti-Covid vaxxer,’ either a hybrid or a pseudo-Anglicisms. These effects are also demonstrated in word-formations within Italian, for instance the pseudo-Anglicisms Fontanavirus and Contevirus, which are formed locally on the Anglicism and model analogue Coronavirus, with a shift from Noun to Name in left position, and different context-based processes of meaning building.