STRUCTURAL AND SEMANTIC MODELS OF THE NEWEST ITALIAN NEOLOGISMS IN MEDIA DISCOURSE AND THEIR RENDERING INTO UKRAINIAN

Abstract

The article examines the structural and semantic models of the newest Italian neologisms attested in Italian-language media discourse between 2023 and 2026, as well as the ways in which these units are rendered into Ukrainian. The material comprises 25 units whose novelty is confirmed both by authoritative Italian neological registers and by dated media contexts.

The analysis of structural models shows that suffixation is the most frequent model, accounting for 24 % of the material, followed by direct unadapted borrowing from English at 20%. Taken together, however, native Italian word-formation mechanisms outnumber direct borrowings, which indicates that the internal word-formation resources of Italian remain productive. Suffixation also frequently performs an evaluative function in media texts. At the semantic level, the leading processes are metaphorisation and terminological nomination, each accounting for 24% of the material, while primary nomination ranks third at 20%. An evaluative component accompanies a considerable number of the new units and is particularly visible in media discourse.

The neologisms are rendered into Ukrainian mainly through descriptive translation, transcoding and calquing, which together account for more than two thirds of the material. Only five units have an attested Ukrainian equivalent in the sources examined, while the remaining renderings are translation proposals formulated within the present study. A connection can be traced between the structural model of a neologism and the procedure used to render it: direct borrowings are most often transcoded, whereas native Italian derivatives more frequently require descriptive rendering. Given the limited size of the corpus, these correlations should be regarded as a tendency rather than an established regularity.