Citation: Llopart-Saumell, Elisabet. 2022. The Transgression of Word-Formation Rules as a Sign of Linguistic Change in Catalan: The Case of -isme,-itis, and -metre. Languages 7: 127. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/languages7020127 Academic Editors: Joan Costa-Carreras and Carla Amorós Negre Received: 11 January 2022 Accepted: 15 April 2022 Published: 19 May 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). languages Article The Transgression of Word-Formation Rules as a Sign of Linguistic Change in Catalan: The Case of -isme,-itis, and -metre Elisabet Llopart-Saumell Institut de Lingüística Aplicada (IULA), Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 08018 Barcelona, Spain; elisabet.llopart@upf.edu Abstract: In Catalan, -isme ‘-ism’, -itis, and -metre ‘-meter’ create new words that do not follow the WFRs described in grammar books and dictionaries. As a result, these lexical innovations, such as panxacontentisme (panxacontent ‘carefree’ + -ism ‘-ism’), titulitis (títol ‘certificate’ + ‘-itis’), and emocionòmetre (emoció ‘emotion’ + -metre ‘-meter’), tend to be considered transgressive. The main aim of this paper is to provide a close review of grammar books and dictionaries among other sources to compare the rules described in the literature and the data provided by the bank of neologisms of the Observatori de Neologia. Since language changes and variations are inherent phenomena of any living language, the deviation experienced by these bound morphemes could be conceived as an example of linguistic change and not only as a one-time transgression. In addition, in order to check whether these linguistic changes are specific to the Catalan language, I reviewed some English, French, and Spanish literature. Finally, a set of diachronic corpora, that covers the time span from the 11th century until the present day, is used to study the first examples of these phenomena in the Catalan language. The results point out that in Catalan, these changes can be traced back to the second half of the 19th century or the beginning of the 20th century, and that they cannot be considered language-specific, since they affect the different languages under study. Keywords: word-formation; transgression; lexical innovation; neologism; language change; norm; -isme; -itis; -metre; Catalan 1. Introduction Morphology, understood as the branch of linguistics that deals with ‘the structure, form, or variation in form (including formation, change, and inflection) of a word or words in a language’ (Oxford English Dictionary), does not only provide word-formation rules (WFRs) to describe existing words, but also to create new words. From a diachronic point of view, the lexicon of a language is characterized by its tendency towards stability, to ensure communication, and a tendency to change, to reflect the variations experienced by society and to adapt to different communicative situations (Guilbert 1975). In more detail, new words are created to either refer to new realities, to communicate with more precision, in the interest of the economy of language, to play with words, to cause a particular effect on the receiver, and so on (Matoré 1952; Guilbert 1975; Cabré 1989; Mounin 1990; Sablayrolles 1993; Sablayrolles 2000; Mejri 2005; Alves 2015; Cabré 2015; García Platero 2015; Winter- Froemel 2018) 1 . Consequently, lexical changes and variations are considered the most common type of linguistic change. As the members of a linguistic community acquire a set of lexical items (or vocabulary), and unconsciously they also learn the WFRs of their native language, speakers are able to generate these new words. Speakers can either combine different words, for example, to create native and syntagmatic compounds; or combine a root and an affix or a combination form, such as in prefixation, suffixation or neoclassical compounding. 2 Languages 2022, 7, 127. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages7020127 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/languages