Language contacts and deonyms in contemporary journalistic Italian language

Abstract

This paper focuses its attention on the presence of deonyms – in this case, new words derived from the surnames of foreign heads of state – in presentday journalistic Italian language. The research was conducted by analyzing the historical archive of two of the most relevant newspapers in Italy: la Repubblica and La Stampa. The purpose is to emphasize the main different semantic nuances of the words consisting of politicians’ surnames and Italian suffixes and to demonstrate the language contacts between Italian and other languages. As it can easily be guessed, most of the words investigated in this study were derived from names of American presidents as a result of the influence of American politics on the Italian system.