Collettivi e categorie ad hoc

The debate on categories has recently found new perspectives thanks to the research of cognitive psychologists on a particular type of categorization process, namely the construction of ad hoc categories like ‘things to take on a picnic’. Since people construct them to achieve their communicative goals, these categories are context-dependent and less established in memory than common categories, but they equally require inferential reasoning based on similarity and possess graded structures. The linguistic strategies used to express ad hoc categories range from connectives to special plural forms and derivational affixes. The aim of this paper is to explore the specific role of collective suffixes. In particular, it will be shown how the Italian suffix -aglia inherits from its Latin antecedent -ālia the possibility of deriving aggregate nouns, and how it can be presently used to build ad hoc categories.