From emergent availability to full profitability: The diachronic development of the Italian suffix -zione from the 16th to the 20th century
Abstract
This paper describes the quantitative development of the Italian suffix -zione within the time span that goes from the 16th to the 19th century. The diachronic period covered is characterised by the first codification of the italiano letterario and the moment in which it becomes the national language of the newly unified Italy.
The article is based upon the corpus data drawn from four corpora covering the traditionally defined periods. It uses the quantative approach to morphological productivity to show, on the four different-sized corpora, the main quantitative characteristics.
The paper establishes that the productivity of the suffix -zione is, across the four centuries, rather constant. On the basis of some complementary lexicographic evidence, it is shown that the situation might be due to the internal structure of the -zione formations, being mosty direct Latin borrowings, where the major verbal inputs, i.e. verbs in -izzare and -ificare, can be traced back to as late as the 19th and 20th centuries.