Kompositionsfreudige Italienreisende. Wortbildungsphänomene in Reiseberichten aus drei Jahrhunderten

This paper focuses on the textual genre ‘travel report’ and analyses range and characteristics of nominal composition phenomena as they occur in a specific text corpus, put together to serve this purpose. Such phenomena are illustrated from a synchronic point of view, i.e. referred to one single text, but also diachronically, thanks to the contrastive analysis of texts written in three different centuries (from 1642 to 1958). The ongoing research provides significant indications about the morphosyntactical strategies used in these texts to build compound words and information about their main linguistic components, such as lexical units, confixes and connecting elements; but it is interesting also in a diachronic perspective, because it points out the development of these strategies and their changes in time as well as the growing specialisation of some compound-related elements. The corpus can also be evaluated with the aim of writing a history of this text genre and, of course, a linguistic history of travel, since it gives evidence about the constitution of a specialised Language of tourism.