Ambiguità lessicale di decollare.

Un’ipotesi di polisemia

Abstract

The present article examines the history and evolution of the word decollare, which in Italian carries both the meanings of ‘to decapitate’ and ‘to depart’, addressing the issue of its lexical ambiguity and the possible classification of the word as either homonymous or polysemous. After the Introduction, the second chapter analyzes the history and development of decollare as ‘to decapitate’, starting from its Latin origins and examining its diachronic use in both Italian and French. The analysis, which takes an etymological, morphological, and semantic approach and reviews several attestations of decollare, aims to understand how the term is conceptualized through the use of ontological categories and how it is perceived by speakers, considering examples from literary sources and newspaper articles. In the third chapter, the same analysis is applied to decollare as ‘to depart’, a meaning introduced into Italian through technical French language, which is the reason why this study also takes French into consideration. Highlighting how the two meanings may be connected in the development of the language, the final chapter adopts a cognitive approach to emphasize the semantic ambiguity of the word decollare and to propose the hypothesis that the two meanings are not homonymous, but rather the result of polysemy arising from an etymological reinterpretation. This study aims to underscore the complexity of linguistic classification, which must consider not only lexicographical criteria but also the cognitive aspect of language perception from the perspective of the speakers.