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This paper deals with, in a diachronic perspective, the Italian verb-noun compounds of the type portalettere and covers the time span that goes from the Origins well into the beginnings of the Twentieth century. On the basis of a rich dataset drawn from diachronic corpora and lexicographic sources, the article presents the history of this word-formation process, emphasizing the semantic and categorial nature of these compounds. The main claim is that the current semantic variability (person, instrument, event, period of time etc.) has always been available in the linguistic history of Italian as well as, to a minor extent, the categorial ambiguity by which VN compounds also function as adjectival modifiers. It is shown that this last function is much of a diachronic innovation. This paper, which stems from the theoretical premises of Construction Morphology, reveals that the productivity of the Construction [V-N]A|N is due to both the semantic and formal flexibility shown from the earliest attestations of the language, and to the productivity of some semi-specified subschemas, which have served as models for the creation of new VN compounds, especially over the past few decades.

WFL is a word formation based resource for Latin where words are analysed in their formative components and connected to each other on the basis of word formation rules. It represents a wide lexical resource for the study of Latin word formation. This paper describes how compounding is treated in the Word Formation Latin lexicon: the methodology and workflow employed to insert compound lemmas into the resource are described, as well as the reasons behind some methodological choices that have been taken during the process. Through the analysis of some types of Latin compounds, the theoretical contribution of this resource is highlighted and outlined.

In this study, I parameterize the five tests proposed by Stevens (2005) for characterizing an element as an affixoid and formulate ten criteria for prefixation. Using these criteria, I analyze the morphological status of the initial components of Modern Greek words beginning with pale - and paʎo -. Contrary to Giannoulopoulou's (1999) analysis of paleo - as a "confix" and paʎo - as a "stem", I argue that pale - is a stem that has two allomorphic realizations: pale ~ paʎ. pale - is marked as [+learnèd] and paʎ - as [-learnèd]. While paʎo - historically derives from pale -, it has acquired a distinct morphological status and should now be considered a prefixoid. The ten criteria I present could serve as a model for determining the morphological status of initial elements in other Greek morphological structures and potentially in other languages where this status is ambiguous. Finally, I propose that prefixation in Greek differs from that in word-based languages. In Greek, prefixation is not a case of morphologization; rather, prefixes originate in and remain confined to the morphological domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper contributes to the study of evaluative morphology by investigating an emerging morphological construction in Italian within the framework of Construction Morphology. The schema in question, which contains the string simil- (related to the adjective simile 'similar') plus a nominal or adjectival base, is analyzed as a newly-created construction that conveys a number of closely-related senses (i.e., fakeness, imitation, resemblance, vagueness, and kin-categorization) revolving around the functional domain of approximation, which has received much less attention than other domains within evaluative morphology. Beside discussing the formal, semantic and usage properties of simil- expressions on the basis of corpus data, we propose a constructional network that accounts for their behavior. Finally, we discuss the nature of simil- as an affixoid and explore its relationship with other competing (morphological and, more marginally, analytic) strategies in Italian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]