"Ti blocco perché sei un trollazzo". Lexical innovation in contemporary Italian in a large Twitter corpus
Authors: Paolo Brasolin, Greta Hayley Franzini, Stefania Spina (EURAC, Università per Stranieri di Perugia, 2023)
Topic: Lexical and Semantic Resources and Analysis

Abstract
This study investigates emerging vocabulary in contemporary Italian in a corpus of 5.32M timestamped and geotagged tweets extracted from the Italian timeline throughout 2022. We automatically identify and manually distill 8,133 candidate neologisms down to 346 unattested word forms, shedding light on their spatio-temporal circulation patterns.

Introduction
Lexical innovation is one of the driving mechanisms of language change [1, 2]: through the creation of new words and their integration into existing lexical systems [3], languages evolve and adapt to new social and technological contexts, which are constantly and rapidly changing. The process of creating new words can be approached from different standpoints. Firstly, the choice of sources necessary to trace the process of lexical innovation has great methodological relevance. One of the main traditional sources have been newspaper texts, which have the double benefit of being easily available and quantitatively relevant [4]. Secondly, lexical innovation follows different steps and usually develops from the initial emergence of new words in specific contexts to their proliferation to wider contexts and domains. This process may end with the institutionalisation of new word forms [5, 6] through their inclusion in dictionaries and consolidation in standard use. Thirdly, the linguistic processes leading to the creation of new words can be different and can include phenomena of derivation, composition, transcategorisation, creation of portmanteau forms, semantic shifts, and borrowing from other languages. The aim of this study is twofold. On the one hand, we present an analysis of emerging vocabulary in contemporary Italian stemming from Twitter interactions using the 2022 Italian timeline as a source; social media represents an opportunity to analyse new word forms surfacing in everyday conversation, and provide vast amounts of data produced in real time by a large, heterogeneous and representative sample of speakers. Furthermore, the availability of geotagged texts enables the investigation of possible patterns of lexical innovation related to specific geographical areas [7]. This possibility is particularly promising in languages, like Italian, characterised by deep and articulated geographical variation. On the other hand, we propose a novel methodology to process and filter word forms acquired from a sizeable Twitter corpus, with the aim of detecting those that represent the best candidates to become new words. The result of the study is a list of 346 word forms, classified into 15 categories based on the linguistic process of lexical creation and yet unattested in two of the most up-to-date Italian lexicographic resources.

Conclusion
Lexical innovation in Twitter seems to stem mostly from creativity, amusement and attention-seeking behaviour rather than a need for specific new words to indicate new objects, events or situations. The sense of belonging to a large and cohesive community such as Twitter plays a key role in the creation and dissemination of new words. The possibility of being adopted and reused in traditional oral conversation, in large (online) communication streams or, in a trans-medial perspective, by the press, makes at least some of these forms reliable candidates to become institutionalised neologisms. Next steps in this ongoing study, to appear in Spina et al. [31], will focus on refining the list of candidate neologisms with additional dictionary look-ups (e.g., Zingarelli [32]) and on extending the analysis to the hashtags we put aside by virtue of their multi-functional and natively univerbated nature. Furthermore, we intend on leveraging our annotation data to examine how the yields of the two methods vary in restricting the threshold choices, in the hope of locating sweet spots to use as a rule of thumb in future studies. Finally, we will experiment with an estimator for the convexity of the cumulative usage, which, while computationally comparable to ρ, has better interpretability. Should Twitter die out, planned efforts to scale-up our analysis to multiple Italian timelines will be redirected to other text-based microblogging and social networking platforms, namely Mastodon10, Bluesky11 and Threads12.