Part of
Inflection and Word Formation in Romance LanguagesEdited by Sascha Gaglia and Marc-Olivier Hinzelin
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 186] 2012
► pp. 369–384
Formation principles of Italian brand names in the food market have been described on the basis of a corpus comprising 950 brand names collected in a field research (Zilg 2006). The analysis of the morphological structure of brand names focuses on the question whether these names can be captured using traditional word-formation concepts and criteria and, if this is the case, which word-formation types are productive. The term “adspeak affixoids” is introduced to describe a creation method at the interface of derivation and compounding. Furthermore, the high combinability of (modifying) suffixes and stems is analysed. Finally, the author tries to answer the question whether morphology acts autonomously with regard to brand names.