On Italian lexical blends: Borrowings, hybridity, adaptations, and native word-formations

This paper addresses intentional lexical blending in Italian as conscious wordplay (cf. e.g. Renner 2015; Sablayrolles 2015a; Zirker and Winter-Froemel 2015). Working on the assumption that the obvious increase in lexical blends in Italian suggests ongoing processes of language change, which, at least partly, appear to be contact-induced, we address the transfer of lexical blends from English, including borrowings, adaptations, and hybrid blends. To this purpose, a preliminary exploration of native blends and lexical blending techniques and the scalar notion of morphotactic (non-)transparency (or opacity) (Dressler 1987; Ronneberger-Sibold 2010, 2012; Cacchiani 2011), will make it possible to discuss types of wordplay – not only formal complexity, transgression, or semantic play on words (Renner 2015) but also graphic play in hybrid blends, pseudo-anglicisms and foreign-sounding word formations. Based on the assumption that discourse mode and genre conventions interact with the selection of blending technique, type of wordplay and pragmatic purpose of the lexical blend – from maximally descriptive to maximally ludic (cf. e.g. Sablayrolles 2015a) – we will suggest some preliminary equations between these dimensions grounded in qualitative analysis of examples from journalese, advertising, names of brands, companies, events, etc., children and nonsense literature. Crucially, where making meta-sense from phonological motivation and play with sound shapes is the goal (e.g. in Lewis Carrollʼs “The Jabberwocky”), choosing to render more transparent ST techniques by means of more morphotactically opaque types in the Italian TT demonstrates the remarkable ability of Italian to exploit lexical blending – if only in specific contexts.