Fitonimia <em>arbëreshe</em>: le designazioni delle piante rampicanti

Abstract

This article provides an analysis of some climbers’ names that are part of a larger research carried out on arbëresh plant names in eight of the fifty Albanian minority villages in the south of Italy. The interest in ethnoclassifications has increased since geolinguistics began to structure its scientific contribution through linguistic atlases (ALE and ALiR). These trans-national enterprises tackle the study of lexical facts considering as fundamental the role that semantic motivation plays during the lexical creation because it represents an essential component of the naming process.
The analysis of the climbers’ names allow, on the one hand, to identify some common semantic patterns lexical creation is based on and, on the other, to provide new insights into Albanian etymology and diachronic lexicology.