Parole nuove dal giornalismo. Analisi delle novità lessicali nei mass media dell’informazione, per una ridefinizione del concetto di Neologia

This work derives from three years of research about neology. Its principal goals are based on four different kinds of approaches:  the first was born as a theorical hypothesis that had to be tested directly and it concerns the possibility of considering neology through an alternative viewpoint rather then the traditional one. First of all, this means to analize neology not only as a creative phenomenon through a morphological and syntactical way, but also as a perceptional and communicative-dialogical one;  the second is a natural result of the previous one and it is about verifying the efficency and the efficacy of the new alternative theory through its application on the analysis of neology in a specific code-speech/special language;  the third concerns massmediatic language and shows that the importance of neological phenomena on journalistic speech is due to communicative and textual functions of the neological word-items;  the fourth concerns the interpretation of the neological phenomena and would verify, supposing its existance (nowadays almost denied by literature), the common neological competence, as a part of the individual linguistic comptence regarding word-formation rules and neologenical mechanisms of native language (that is to say Italian). This work is divided into four chapters, each illustrating the ways drawn by this research about these four goals. Chapter I claims the necessity of a rethinking on the neological phenomenon through the construction of a uniform theory that can overcome diffculties and the fragmentary nature of traditional perspectives, and can establish a more fruitful relationship between neology and lexicography; moreover, it can show the sociological aspects of neological performance, especially on the perceptional side of it: i.e. the neological quality and status and the acceptability of new words. The architecture of unitary neological theory is based also on a new nomenclature and for this reason new metalinguistic labels are introduced to describe more accurately the sociolinguistic and textual aspects of this phenomenon. Especially, a new hierarchy is proposed for some labels: neologism is mostly left, neoformazione and neosemia are adopted, and new labels are introduced, like Espressione A Valenza Neologenica (as all-encompassing phenomenon label) and Neologenia (label that can be used instead of neologism, because it describes better the principal issues of the textual phenomena of neology and it is more inclusive for their linguistic manifestations). The definition of neologenia as lexical neophorical phenomenon introduces and shows the core of the unitary theory that is the consideration of the linguistic newness no more and not only as a product of word formation rules (even though it is connected with the creative and generative linguistic competence of the speakers community), but as a linguistic place rhetorically marked. So neologenia is a figure of speech that involves Sender and Recipient and it shows itself as a speech act with poetical functions. Therefore, the advantages of rethorical neology theory are discussed and are shown by a description of the methodology explaining the linguistic analysis of the EVAN. Chapter II comes, after including neology into the massmediatic “Space of Discourse”, to apply rhetorical theory on journalistic language. Initially, we look at the speech and at the linguistic strategies of tv-news, newspapers and newsweb, and than we sketch a preliminary picture of the main characteristics of massmediatic neology, about its significance, the structure of neological sources, its aspects connected to logos (typology and tendency) and to neos. Later, we enter the main side of neological phenomenon in the journalistic context: we analize its general properties, the distinctions between diachronic and synchronic states and we introduce the relevance of the perceptual dynamics in this communicative context. The remarks deriving from studies upon neology led to the construction of our rhetoric theory, and they have been organized through the introduction of the relationship between neology and language functions: we describe macro and micro-functions of massmediatic neology, with great attention to the newness-centered strategies of journalistic speech. With this chapter the theorical and descriptive section of this work comes to and end. The next two chapters concern data and results of applied research, including the analysis of the massmediatic EVAN corpus, that has been collected by a fine examination of newspapers and webnews and by watching tv-news. This part includes a psycholinguistic survey about neology, done by handing out the questionnaire to a sample of Italian speakers. Chapter III describes the main issues of neology in Italian contemporary juornalistic language. After discussing theorical and linguistic fundamentals that guided our work, and after showing the organization and the methodology of analysis and research, we present three Lexicographic Tables that collect 3.038 entries representing EVANs from the newspaper corpus (1944 new words), from the tv-news corpus (345) and from the web-news corpus (794). We complete the contextual, linguistic and neologenical analisys of entries by a sequence of case reports; the analysis is followed by results and a summary of research. The last IV chapter is instead dedicated to the inquiry of perception of massmediatic neology, that is to say to the neologic phenomenon considered on the side of the recipient. So we describe first organization of psycholinguistic inquiry: sample, fitting, distribution of the questionnaire, its structure, examination, collection and methodology of data analysis. Then we show and comment the results of the test-giving. From the extrapolation and comparative analysis of data we acquire evidence about relationships between speakers’ age and neology, massmediatic use and neology, favourite media and neology, acceptability and fixing factors. At last, we summarize and discuss evidences about perception of massmediatic EVANs. The remarks of three years of research, described in this work, allowed to confirm the four opening hypothesis and showed, on the creative and perceptual side of this phenomenon, that neology can be properly considered as a rhetoric event and, on the interpreting side of phenomenon, the existance of a specific linguistic ability, the neological competence by which speakers can recognise precisely the lexical novelty, even though they haven’t complete contextual information, without overlaps with other kinds of lexical items, i.e. archaisms or low-frequency words. Neological competence permits to verify that textual sections neologenically-marked have a strong role as attention getters and this is the reason why neologenie can orient the reading of news on juornalistic articles. This shows also the relevance of the neological phenomenon on this specific linguistic context.