L’expansion du suffixe

Over the past decades, the suffix -issime has been spreading in French, particularly in informal usage. This absolute superlative existed in Old French, but disappeared early unlike Italian, where it was, and still is, very frequent. It was then borrowed during the Renaissance, but met a lot of resistance and has not been used as in the other Romance languages. But it was borrowed in the same way in the Ibero-Romance languages (cf. Bengtsson 2019 & 2020). The reason for this use is probably due to a lack in French, in particular in spoken language (Koch & Oesterreicher 2011); there seems to be a need from the speakers to fill this gap. Thus, the expressive or emotional function might be at play (Jakobson 1963). In this article, we will firstly make an inventory of these occurrences in FrenchWeb2023, in comparison with previous results. Then, we will examine the trademarks and site names on the net containing this ending, which have become frequent. This phenomenon seems to increase. As Berthelot-Guiet points out (2015), a neologism has several discursive purposes, which will be the line of enquiry in this part.