In Italian, as in other Romance languages, the use of adjectives derived from the names and surnames of people (the so-called "de-anthroponymic adjectives") is more widespread than in Dutch and...Show moreIn Italian, as in other Romance languages, the use of adjectives derived from the names and surnames of people (the so-called "de-anthroponymic adjectives") is more widespread than in Dutch and other Germanic languages. In this thesis we first investigate which suffixes are used to form such adjectives and which factors determine the choice of the suffix. One of the unexpected results is that for foreign names there appears to be no predilection for analytic formulations; they simply follow the same rules as those for Italian names. A second field of study is that of the pragmatic aspects. It was found that de-anthroponymic adjectives are being used more in the humanities than in the natural sciences, more in written language than in spoken language and for some (but not all) disciplines more in texts that give a historic or panoramic overview than in texts that describe current research. The third area of investigation is that of possible morphosyntactic restrictions. Surprisingly, a morphosyntactic rule that blocks the immediate repetition of the same phonetic group proves not to hold, witness the occurrence of words like 'tavianiano', 'tizianiano' and 'savianiano'. Adjectives ending in -cano, which are quite common in the adjacent field of toponomastics, are extremely rare in the field of anthroponomastics.Show less
