Conversione interlinguistica tra inglese e italiano: metalessicografia e linguistica dei corpora

The present study aims to investigate the phenomenon of conversion from an interlinguistic point of view, taking into account the Italian and the English language. Some of the Anglicisms present in the Italian language have been subject to conversion, meaning that they are used in Italian with a given grammatical class which is different from their original English one, whilst usually maintaining the same general semantic features. An example is the word fashion, which is a noun in English but it is used as an adjective in Italian. In short, some words may undergo a process of conversion when they are borrowed in a recipient language. The present work is conducted on the grounds that, in linguistics, the phenomenon of conversion is a widely researched word-formation process but limited to an intralinguistic perspective and rarely studied within an interlinguistic context. The process of conversion is widespread in the English language and it enables users to create new words within a language. For example, the word water may be both a verb and a noun; the same applies to the word walk, which can be a verb and a noun; intellectual belongs both to the word class of adjectives and to that of nouns. Conversion also occurs at an interlinguistic level, this happens when a loanword changes its word-class membership in the borrowing process, that is when it is transferred from a donor language to a recipient language. By taking into account the Italian and the English language, this happens when an Anglicism belonging to a certain word class in English acquires a new word-class status in Italian, thus belonging to a different part of speech: in these instances, the term in question undergoes a conversion process at an interlinguistic level. Thus, it is apparent that the phenomenon of conversion is a word-formation process that may take place both at an intralinguistic and an interlinguistic level. More specifically, the aim of this study is to analyse this latter circumstance through empirical data. In general, the mechanism of conversion is a subtype of derivation, a process that allows language users to create new words from an already existing one, e.g. weakness from weak, writer from write, disagree from agree. Derivation involves the use of suffixes and prefixes to create new words, whose semantic features and field recall those of the original word: for instance, the word unkind derives from the adjective kind, to which the prefix -un is added. However, it must be noted that prefixes are usually class-preserving whereas suffixes are usually class-changing. All in all, in some cases of derivation, the grammatical category varies even though the word form does not change: the same word form may indeed appear in different contexts, hence performing different functions, e.g. round can be a noun, an adjective and a verb. This particular type of derivation is labelled in several ways: conversion (Sweet 1891: 61), zero derivation (Don 2005: 2), functional shift (Brinton 2010: 101; Finegan 2008: 49) and zero morpheme (Marchand 1969: 359). In Italian this phenomenon is labelled conversione (Scalise & Bisetto 2008) and derivazione zero (Salvi & Vanelli 2004). In this case, the meaning is only marginally affected; what varies is solely its grammatical category. In short, conversion is a word-formation process that does not require alteration of the word form, yet the grammatical class changes. Regardless of the multiple terminology present in the li