A word is born: the meaning of Abilismo

Abstract

The word Abilismo (Ableism) has entered the vocabulary of the Italian language only a few years ago. To better understand its meaning and diffusion, it is good to start with similar linguistic elements already known. The formation of the lexicon involves many processes which will not be dealt with here. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate how the term Ableism is born. Starting from other words ending with suffix -ismo (-ism), we will see whether Ableism can be considered a derivative with the same semantic characteristics as the other -isms that generally designate specific meanings. As a matter of fact, the meaning of the term is transparent since it is a function of the parts that composed it, but it could also be ambiguous since the suffix -ism can be interpreted in various ways. Eleven cluster have been created to designate he differ meanings of -isms and then the word frequency of each word il calculated. This is useful for the selection of various stimuli to propose to the participants of this experiment. Finally, through the intuitions of meaning expressed in the questionnaire, it is possible to observe if the word Ableism is known or used by speakers and to which cluster it belongs.