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Un approccio cognitivo alla formazione delle parole: il caso dei composti con suffissi d’agente in russo
The aim of the present paper is to investigate Russian compounds formed with agentive suffixes from a cognitive perspective. These compounds, in which two lexical roots are followed by an agentive suffix (including the zero agentive suffix), have been analyzed based on the metonymical shifts underlying their formation, following the methodology proposed by Janda (2011) for suffixal word-formation. We compare the behavior of agentive suffixes in compounding and in suffixation (cf. Janda 2011), shedding some light on the similarities and differences between the two word-formation processes. We also employ the cognitive tools of metonymy and metaphor to identify other significant shifts occurring at the lexical level and concerning the source element of the compounds.