L’emergere degli elementi affissoidi nel cinese contemporaneo: uno studio basato su corpus di 感 (gǎn) e 味 (wèi)

This study investigates the emergence of affixoid elements in contemporary Chinese, focusing on the morphemes 感 (gǎn, ‘sense’) and 味 (wèi, ‘flavor’). The analysis situates affixoids within broader debates on the boundary between compounding and derivation. Western frameworks, including Construction Morphology (Booij 2005, 2010) and usage-based models (Bybee 2006, 2010), emphasize frequency and schematic generalization as mechanisms of grammaticalisation. Chinese scholarship has followed a distinct trajectory, which can be traced chronologically: from Lü’s (1979) initial proposal of lèi cí zhuì (“affixoids”), through the refinement of definitional criteria in the 1990s, to corpus-based and constructional approaches in recent decades. Methodologically, the study combines three complementary dimensions. Quantitative analysis measures productivity in the creation of neologisms, distributional constraints, and comparability with established affixes such as -化 (huà) and -性 (xìng). Qualitative analysis traces semantic shifts, structural fixation, and pragmatic specialization, particularly in online discourse. Diachronic comparison identifies three critical transitions: the reform era (1840–1919) where Japanese-mediated translations introduced new patterns, the post-1949 period shaped by political standardization and economic reform (Yin 2007), and the post-2000 digital age where internet discourse accelerated morphological innovation (Basciano & Bareato 2020). Findings show that 感 has developed into a highly productive suffixoid used in evaluative neologisms (e.g., 仪式感 yíshì-gǎn ‘sense of ceremony’), while 味 has evolved pragmatic and stylistic functions in digital neologisms (e.g., 土味 tǔ-wèi ‘tacky style’). These developments illustrate the gradient nature of grammaticalisation and demonstrate how social, historical, and technological factors drive affixoidisation in Chinese.