Circulation and motivation of recent changes in the use of Italian words
Abstract
Within the distinction between prescriptive and descriptive grammar, this paper considers several new uses of Italian words whose high frequency—both diastratically and diaphasically—in two big written corpora (newspaper La Stampa, years 1992-2001, and the online corpus RIDIRE) suggest they are no longer simply errors, but gradually received innovations. The words are classified according to the reason inducing speakers to adopt them, namely (a) analogy to, or exchange with, some other term formally similar and more accessible; (b) a “simplified and impoverished” interpretation, whereby some semantic trait is lost because speakers understood the word’s meaning limitedly, or rather generically, when found in specific contexts; (c) some syntactic conditions associated to the use of the term, which led speakers to give it meaning or usage different from the canonical ones. In view of these findings, guidance is considered for the way such new uses should be dealt with in the teaching of Italian.
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