WORD-FORMATION PRODUCTIVITY OF ABBREVIATIONS IN ITALIAN AND SERBIAN / MONTENEGRIN: DERIVATION BY SUFFIXATION

Abstract

The research is focused on the comparison between the abbreviations in modern Italian and those in Serbian and Montenegrin language, as stems for derivation by nominal, adjectival, and verbal suffixes. The approach is contrastive, and for the corpora were used mostly materials extracted from the daily press, as well as dictionaries of neologisms in the case of Italian corpus. For the Italian corpus, the dictionaries used were Neologismi: Parole nuove dai giornali (2009) by Istituto Treccani, with an updated online version of that dictionary on the publisher’s site https://www.treccani.it/magazine/lingua_italiana/neologismi/, as well as the database ONLI: Osservatorio Neologico della Lingua Italiana (https://www.iliesi.cnr.it/ONLI/), which collects materials mostly from daily and weekly press. Several studies on abbreviations were also very helpful as the source for examples of suffixation. Serbian and Montenegrin press was analyzed as one corpus, as there are virtually no differences between these languages as far as abbreviations are concerned. The latter corpus relies mostly on online versions of Serbian and Montenegrin daily press (Vijesti, Pobjeda, Dan, Novosti, Telegraf, Politika, and so on), with several examples taken from social media, blogs and web portals, for the most part through the web site Kontekst.io (https://www.kontekst.io/) which for Serbian corpus uses database srWaC (Serbian Web, https://www.clarin.si/noske/run.cgi/corp_info?corpname=srwac&struct_attr_ stats=1&subcorpora=1). As in printed Serbian and Montenegrin literature were found only older and, in some cases, outdated examples, it was necessary to complement this corpus with newer and more up-to-date materials. In the corpora analysis, neologisms derived from acronyms by suffixation were of particular interest, as an indicator of vitality and productivity of these lexical items in modern language. As they become more and more present in modern languages, this traditional approach to abbreviations as a marginal anomaly should be revised. It is necessary to establish consistent rules of writing and pronouncing for some acronyms, as well as to meet the requirements of everyday use which their limited inflection and morphosyntactic irregularity can complicate. Although their form does not conform to the rest of the language system, their use is becoming more frequent and encompassing, and the number of derivations from the most used and present abbreviations keeps growing. In both Serbian and Montenegrin linguistics, the research of abbreviations has merely started as far as word formation is concerned. Therefore, this field offers a lot of potential for further research, especially if one observes the daily influence of extralinguistic context on the changes in modern language.