LE VERBE DENOMINATIF EN ROMAGNOL : LA QUESTION DE LA REGULARITE SEMANTIQUE DU SYSTEME DE DERIVATION
THE DENOMINATIVE VERB IN ROMAGNOL: THE ISSUE OF SEMANTIC REGULARITY IN THE DERIVATION SYSTEM

Summary/Abstract: Starting from the findings of a lexicographical work of “romagnolo” dialect (Ercolani, Vocabolario romagnolo-italiano), we will try to make a contribution to a widely debated issue of the last decades: i.e. to what extent can we foresee the sense of a derived word starting from the meaning of its basis? The choice of a dialect (and not of a national language), and of a limited category of words, (the verb pairs composed from the same substantive) was made with a view to making the sample more practical and more easily focused on a particularly favourable case. From the study of 116 pairs that satisfy this definition, we have concluded that the meaning of ¾ of them can be built properly by means of four rules (WFR) corresponding to four morphological types of derived words (with the prefix in- /s-/ infix –ac- / without prefix). It follows that the main obstacles to a correct deciphering are the semantic splitting of the basis (polysemy) on the one hand, and the extraction from only one of its semes (metaphor), on the other; the case of idiosyncrasy or of polysemy of the affixes, are on the contrary, quite reduced. We can conclude that there exist some linguistic systems where the derived legibility lets the speaker form, starting from favourable cases (like these pairs of denominatives which clearly oppose the derived two by two), semantic rules that assign a predicted meaning to each morphological type.

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