Word formation in contemporary Tucumán Spanish: commentary in light of real-life examples of language use

Abstract

This article presents the results of an introductory linguistic study on word formation in the Spanish language in use in the province of Tucumán, Argentina. Based on a representative sample of recently created lexias, extracted mainly from social networks, we sought to
present a morphological and semantic description of neological derivatives found for this microvariety of Spanish. The analysis carried out, guided by the theoretical framework of descriptive morphology (Bosque and Demonte, 1999; Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, 2009; Rainer, 1993; Varela, 2018; Hualde, Olarrea, Escobar and Travis, 2010; Lang, 1992), focused on four formation schemes, constituted with the suffixal elements -azo, -ería, -ardo and -ovich, which build authentic lexical series in the verified corpus, with the detection of various derivatives. Likewise, other suffixal formative patterns (with the particles -ción, -ismo, -ista and -ito) and other schemes related to prefixation (with anti-, re-, des-, super-, mega- and multi-), composition, truncation and lexical crossing were discussed in passant. In addition to this analysis, the aim was to establish the state of research on lexical creation in Argentine and Tucumán Spanish, by tracking comments on the subject in specialized studies published from the second half of the last century until the year 2025. It has been possible to verify, then, that there is a large gap in the research on lexical morphology of NOA Spanish, for which there are only a couple of reference publications, limited to diminutive and augmentative suffixation.
In short, this article undertakes a modest approach to word formation in contemporary Tucuman Spanish, with the hope that it will serve as a source of inspiration for a more robust future study, based on a broad set of empirical data, that provides an in-depth mapping and analysis of lexical generation in the Spanish language spoken and written in The Garden of the Republic.