Composizione-univerbazione? Le oscillazioni di grafia nei produttivi composti italiani a schema (N) VN sul materiale linguistico tratto da La Gazzetta dello Sport negli anni 2016—2020

Word-formation and compounding in Italian present many interesting challenges (classification of compounds, its interpretation and types of semantic relationship that may hold between the compound’s elements). This article attempts to examine a different one — the orthography of one productive compounding pattern in present-day Italian, that is Verb + Noun compounds. Various accounts of Verb + Noun ortography are reviewed, with special focus on the status of hyphenated words. In light of this data, the author focuces also on the problem of inclusion of compounds as multi-word units by dictionaries. The aim of this research is to contrast theoretical prescriptions with some data samples of Italian (Noun) Verb + Noun compounds drawn from La Gazzetta dello Sport (2016—2020). With this analysis the author wants to examine more in detail whether the use reflects what Italian grammarians claim about the Verb + Noun compounds ortography rules, because in various researches conducted in this field that aspect has often been neglected.