Ti va una apericena al ristobar? I blend in italiano come lessicalizzazioni complesse

This work is about blending, a word formation process ascribed by the scholars to “minor morphology” (Scalise, 1983) or even to “extragrammatical morphology” (Dressler, 1987; 2000) because of its oddness and its irregular morphological behaviour. Basing on a corpus of 305 Italian blends sorted by Zingarelli (2018), this work aims at recognizing the peculiar features of blending in Italian on all linguistic levels. All in all, Italian blends exhibit the following peculiarities: they can be formed by the juxtaposition of splinters originated by categories of source words not involved in blending in other languages (verbs. even interjections); almost half of the corpus is formed by an initial splinter + a whole word; in a very high number of blends the splinters entertain a relationship of subordination (instead of the expected relationship of coordination); often (but not always) the gender assigned to the blend matches the gender of the final splinter.