"Incontournable" (parte I). Dai dizionari a FranText

In this contribution, we study the adjective incontournable, which, despite the unfavorable opinion of the Académie Française, has recently established itself by spreading especially in texts dedicated to tourism promotion. The survey begins with dictionaries, in print and online, which define incontournable as an adjective and as a noun. Then we considered the morphological organization and meaning of the word, which is part of a very large subclass, that of deverbal adjectives with negative prefix and suffix -able. Finally, we checked its occurrences in the textual base FranText. The occurrences, almost all of them very recent, mostly adjective adjectival but also nominal, confirm the data emerged from the of the dictionaries: the prevalence of the metaphorical value of incontournable value of incontournable, with a shift of meaning from "unavoidable obstacle" to "experience not to be missed".