From sexgate to vallettopoli: Contrasting English and Italian combining forms

So far combining forms have been primarily the object of morphological and semantic analysis. Most scholars focus on their morphotactics (namely, Marchand, 1969; Bauer, 1983; Fradin, 2000; Plag, 2003; Iacobini, 2004), and others also lay emphasis on their regularity and productivity, esp. in terms of frequency, semantic coherence and applicability (Warren, 1990; Mattiello, 2007). In this study I wish to explore combining forms from a contrastive English-Italian perspective, and lay emphasis on the similarities and dissimilarities which the two languages exhibit in their combining-form combinations. The core hypothesis from which this study moves is that most combining forms are not local, but rather borrowed or adapted from other languages. Both English and Italian indeed display a rich array of neoclassical combining forms of Greek or Latin origin: e.g., E. techno- and -logy / It. tecno- and -logia, which respectively obtain technology and tecnologia. But I am particularly intrigued by the combining forms which derive from the contact between the two languages at issue, and which produce, for instance, Italian loan words (e.g. based on -gate from E. Watergate, as in sexgate), hybridisms (e.g. with -land from E. land, as in Gardaland), and lexical Anglicisms, e.g. -landia, as in Fiabilandia (from E. Disneyland), or structural, e.g. -dipendente (from E. drug dependant/addict), as in teledipendente.