Un genere dentro le parole. Caratteristiche formali e pragmatiche di alcune neo-formazioni online

The language level most exposed to variation is the lexical level (Muñoz-Basols & Salazar 2016). Variation on the lexical level mirrors changes in society (Stepanyan 2019; Foubert & Lemmens 2018). Recent trends include the creation of gendered neologisms (NG), linguistic neoformations that include meaning about some gender in a lexeme (Szymańska 2022: 260). The present work aims to describe some NGs with member -girl-, loans from English, in the Italian X, through occurrences collected through manual extraction. The database consists of 4488 posts with occurrences of girlie, girly, girl math, girl dinner, girls’ girl, girl boss. The novelty of the study lies both in the language chosen, Italian, since there are no studies on NGs in Italian yet, and in the subject matter, since even in English for this type of neologisms, neoformations with boy and man members have mostly been considered (Lutzky & Lawson 2019; Palacios Martinez 2023), few are the studies on woman. The analysis will first look at semantic and formal features (grammatical gender, syntactic structures, morphological properties) and then at pragmatic functions.