Esiti di un processo unicizzante o parole storicamente sprovviste di autonomia collocazionale? Uno sguardo alla diacronia delle cranberry words in italiano

The present study deals with extremely restricted collocability in Italian and analyses the phenomenon from a historic perspective. By following the diachronic development of a sample of lexemes and word-forms with strongly limited combinatorial potential and often lacking in both syntactic and semantic autonomy (these forms are usually referred to as cranberry words or monocollocable words), extracted from corpora, and the fixed combinations in which they occur, it tries to shed light on the origin of these peculiar words and on the lexicalisation processes of multiword expressions with a monocollocable component in Italian. One of the principal aims of the paper is to verify the widespread hypothesis that cranberry words are the result of a diachronic process leading to a progressive loss of combinatorial possibilities of originally autonomous lexemes. The diachronic analysis shows that the situation is much more complex: only some of the examined words can be considered archaisms (or historisms), whereas many monocollocable forms are characterised, historically, by combinatorial restrictions, appearing in the language already as components of multiword units. Furthermore, some of the studied examples suggest that the “unicalisation” process is not unidirectional and that there is a constant exchange between free lexemes and distributionally idiosyncratic items contributing to an incessant enrichment of the lexicon.