Productividad del sufijo -ero en la neología del español de Argentina, Chile y Uruguay1

Abstract

This study analyses the morphological and semantic features of the Spanish suffix '-ero' in neologisms resulting from suffixation produced in Argentinean, Chilean and Uruguayan Spanish, as a way of verifying their vitality. For this purpose, neological coinages, including this suffix from a corpus of 147 items, collected from six newspapers from Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, are studied. Both the type frequency and the token frequency were recorded for all the cases. Then the different meanings of the suffix '-ero' were analyzed and classified into four different categories. Finally, the coinages ending in '-ero' and '-ista' attached to the same root were compared and contrasted, and the possibility of their co-occurrence was observed. The most productive value for '-ero' is that which refers to a profession or activity. These new terms fall into the categories of denominative neology and stylistic variation. The results suggest that the high productivity of the suffix '-ero' might be due to the fact that, as it is integrated into the morphosyntactic system of the speakers, they easily resort to it.