35.1327, Review: The Influence of English on Italian: Pulcini (2023)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-35-1327. Thu Apr 25 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.1327, Review: The Influence of English on Italian: Pulcini (2023)

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Date: 26-Apr-2024
From: Lelija Socanac [lelijasocanac at gmail.com]
Subject: Sociolinguistics: Pulcini (2023)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/34.2434

AUTHOR: Virginia Pulcini
TITLE: The Influence of English on Italian
SUBTITLE: Lexical and Cultural Features
SERIES TITLE: LANGUAGE CONTACT AND BILINGUALISM
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2023

REVIEWER: Lelija Socanac

SUMMARY

This book provides an up-to-date overview of the influence of English
on Italian, exploring the historical, social, cultural, and linguistic
aspects of the contact between Italy and English-speaking countries.
Types of English-induced borrowings are presented on the basis of
quantitative and qualitative information provided by Italian
lexicographic sources and corpus-based evidence. Criteria of currency
and frequency are discussed with reference to a multilingual project
(GLAD – Global Anglicisms Database), offering a contribution to
loanword lexicography.

The book consists of a List of figures, a List of tables, seven
chapters, Conclusions, References, Index of names/subjects, and Index
of borrowings and quoted words.

Chapter 1: “Introducing the Study of Anglicisms in Italian” provides
an overview of the impact of English as a global language on European
languages, focusing on Italian. The influence of one language on
another depends on a number of social and psychological factors such
as a favorable or hostile socio-political setting, language ideology
and policy, language attitudes, etc. Contacts occur in the history of
most languages. For this reason, linguistic purism is contradicted by
historical evidence witnessing that languages change over time under
internal and external pressures resulting in innovation, creativity,
and imitation. Although the languages and cultures of Europe have
intensely influenced one another for centuries, the ‘Anglicization’ of
European languages intensified in the post-Second World War period. In
the new millennium, the removal of space and time barriers thanks to
increased mobility, the mass media, the internet and social networks,
have led to far more intense contacts across geographical boundaries,
and the influence of English has spread to all areas of knowledge,
culture, and society. Thus, global English functions as a ‘cultural
adstrate’ around the world, exporting language and culture to
societies that are only virtually close. In the future, the influence
of English is likely to intensify even further, offering linguists
interested in language contact a variety of English-induced phenomena
to record and describe.

The influence of English on Italian is the outcome of a long-standing
relationship which started several centuries ago, intensified in the
18th century, and has massively increased since the second half of the
20th century. Contacts between the two languages mostly belong to
distant borrowing, with lexical borrowing the most common outcome.
Thus, although Italian has expanded its vocabulary with hundreds of
English words, this has not affected its morpho-syntactic system. The
most common types of borrowing are single-word items and compounds. A
variety of phraseological units can also be observed. The research
data providing the basis for the book were retrieved from various
sources, including historical accounts of contacts between Italy and
English-speaking countries, dictionaries, online newspaper archives,
and language corpora.

The study of Anglicisms in Italian cannot be approached without
considering how this phenomenon has affected other languages. A
pioneer in the comparative study of Anglicisms in European languages
was Rudolf Filipović (1974, 1996), who set up the project ‘The English
Element in European Languages’ as early as the 1960s and who
identified some guiding principles and a methodology to study the
integration of Anglicisms in selected receiving languages. This
ambitious project was followed up by Manfred Görlach, who completed
the Dictionary of European Anglicisms (2001) and some companion
articles and volumes (Görlach 2002a).

Chapter 2: “English in Italy: History of language contact” reviews the
historical contacts between Italy and the English-speaking countries
in chronological order and provides examples of loanwords imported in
the course of time. The goal is to illustrate the historical
circumstances that favored the adoption of Anglicisms over the
centuries, highlighting the domains which were affected. Early
contacts resulting from commercial and diplomatic relations in the
periods between the 13th and the 17th centuries brought into Italian a
few terms related to British political and social life. In the 18th
century, many Anglicisms were imported from the domains of politics,
fashion, and social life. This period was characterized by
‘Anglomania’, admiration for British society and culture. In the 19th
century, a number of Anglicisms related to transport, industrial
production, fashion, and sports started entering the language. Due to
its international dominance in the 18th and 19th centuries, French
often acted as a mediator between English and Italian. The fascist
regime in Italy (1922-1945) was the only historical period when
resistance to foreign influence was regulated by legislation. The
creation of domestic equivalents to replace foreign borrowings was
encouraged. After the Second World War, the ‘Americanization’ of
Italian society began, with an increase in borrowings from the fields
of information and communication technology (ICT), economics and its
sub-disciplines, science, and the internet. The new millennium brought
intense mass communication through web-mediated channels, increased
circulation of neologisms and translations from English, and improved
English competence among the Italian professionals and general
population. Moreover, many Italian neologisms originating from EU
documents were translated from English.

Chapter 3: “Direct borrowings” introduces the terminology in use in
the field of language contact and bilingualism. Direct borrowings
denote lexical items which keep the formal features of the donor
language, while indirect borrowings replace the model with a
translation (calque), or add a new imported meaning to an already
existing word (semantic borrowing). According to traditional
approaches, the borrowing process triggers a remodeling of the source
word according to the rules of the receiving language. The independent
creation of lexical ‘copies’ in the recipient language is emphasized
by cognitive approaches (Alexieva 2008), according to which the donor
language limits itself to offering a model, or prototype, to the
recipient language, which will creatively reproduce it in order to
innovate its own lexicon. Lexical borrowing is not a straightforward,
one-way process, since words may be transferred by multiple routes.

In this chapter, direct borrowings are described, in particular
non-adapted loanwords as the largest category. Besides one-word
Anglicisms, the category of compounds is very productive. Hybrid
neological combinations of Italian and English elements are
potentially productive. The category of abbreviations, including
acronyms, clippings, and blends, is also quite abundant. Further types
of borrowings are also considered, such as Latinisms, eponyms,
archaisms, exoticisms, and interjections, as well as
pseudo-Anglicisms. The creation of pseudo-Anglicisms is a growing
phenomenon, and sometimes the same pseudo-Anglicisms circulate across
languages. The chapter ends with the treatment of phraseology. In
addition to phraseologisms, lexical items with a pragmatic function
are discussed, including interjections, discourse markers, vocatives,
and other constructions.

Chapter 4: “Integration and indirect borrowings” deals with
phonological, orthographic, morpho-syntactic, and semantic integration
of Anglicisms in Italian. Integration is defined as the positioning of
a loanword within the new linguistic environment of the recipient
language. Phonological integration affects the pronunciation of
non-adapted Anglicisms. Over the past decades, the pronunciation of
Anglicisms has been quite close to the English model, owing to their
input through audio channels and a greater competence in spoken
English of younger generations of Italians. Orthographic and
morphological integration affect the formal appearance of Anglicisms.
The influence of French mediation is evident both in the spelling and
pronunciation in some cases. Grammatical (or morpho-syntactic)
integration involves gender attribution, the assignment of grammatical
class (mainly noun, adjective, adverb, or verb), and formal adaptation
(e.g., Italian verbs display inflectional endings for mood, person,
number, and gender). The scale of adaptability common to contact
situations places nouns in the top position among the open-class
words, and less frequent elements such as adverbs and interjections at
the bottom. As to semantic integration, the most common feature is
reduction of meaning with respect to the English model, both in the
case of technical and scientific terms and common words. The opposite
phenomenon is semantic extension, often due to metaphor and metonymy.
In some cases, pejoration or amelioration of meaning is observed.
Whereas phonological and morpho-syntactic integration is
language-specific, lexical meaning can be observed
cross-linguistically, so that the meaning of an Anglicism in Italian
can be compared to the meaning that the same Anglicism has developed
in other recipient languages.

The chapter also deals with the two main types of indirect borrowings:
calques and semantic loans. The former replace the English model by an
Italian translation equivalent, while the latter borrow a new meaning
which is attached to an already existing Italian word. The genetic
similarity between English and Italian lexicons resulting from their
shared classical word-stock is constantly referred to since it is
considered crucial in establishing typological distinctions. On the
one hand, it facilitates the transfer of Anglicisms and their
integration into Italian; on the other, it makes the description of
indirect borrowings particularly difficult.

Another topic discussed in this chapter is the coexistence of
Anglicisms with their Italian equivalents. No definitive conclusions
can be reached on the factors that influence speakers’ preferences
regarding the choice between an Anglicism and an Italian word.
Preliminary data suggest that brevity, modernity, and prestige play in
favor of Anglicisms, while semantic opacity and difficult
pronunciation of an Anglicism may induce speakers to opt for the
Italian word. The historical dimension of language contact is
addressed with reference to internationalisms, which may help to
refine the typology of lexical borrowings, separating Anglicisms from
independent heritage vocabulary and neological creations.

Chapter 5: “Dictionaries, newspaper archives and corpora” aims to
explore the notion of ‘Anglicization’ of Italian as an open question
rather than a given fact. It provides objective figures on the number
of Anglicisms in Italian on the basis of selected sources, namely
dictionaries, newspaper archives, and language corpora. The number of
Anglicisms recorded by dictionaries varies from over a thousand to
several thousand, depending on their size and time frame, on divergent
criteria of inclusion of technical and scientific terms, and on the
types of borrowing considered. To illustrate this, a comparison is
made between the letter J entries in representative dictionaries and
the selection involving the GLAD’s word list. Candidate Anglicisms
were then searched in a newspaper archive (‘la Repubblica’) and in two
corpora of Italian, CORIS and Italian Web 2020, to verify their
currency, frequency, orthographic forms, and meanings. The
corpus-based query proved that Anglicisms are low-frequency items in
Italian. New data on the sociolinguistic distribution of Anglicisms in
spoken and written registers may contribute to place the supposed
‘invasion’ of Anglicisms in a more objective perspective.

Chapter 6: “Anglicisms in specialized domains” explores Anglicisms in
domains that have been intensely affected by English borrowings,
namely ICT, economy, and sport. After more than two centuries, the
introduction of Anglicisms in the field of sport has started to
decline and many English sports terms, especially those related to
popular sports such as football, have been replaced by Italian
equivalents. By contrast, ICT and economy appear to be extremely
productive. Both fields possess terminology that is confined only to
expert-to-expert communication as well as words that have spread to
the general vocabulary. Research into the ‘vertical’ variation in the
use of Anglicisms by different communities of practice has not been
adequately explored in the Italian context so far. At the other end of
the spectrum, the neglected area of obsolescence is examined based on
a sample of old-fashioned Anglicisms, many of which have fallen out of
use and are no longer included in general dictionaries. Lexical
obsolescence usually occurs when material referents or fashions die
out. In many cases, some meanings become obsolete without the loss of
the word. Equally peripheral are Anglicisms occasionally used in
newspapers, adverts, and shop signs because of their eye-catching
value, which makes the English language ‘visible’ in the Italian
linguistic landscape.

Chapter 7: “English in Italian education” deals with the growing
importance of English in Italian education since the second half of
the 20th century. Italy has gradually aligned its educational system
with the model of mother tongue + two foreign languages recommended by
the European Union. However, national reforms have increasingly
encouraged the study of English, which has become the undisputed first
foreign language in all educational cycles, followed by French and, to
a much lesser degree, German and Spanish. Attitudes toward English are
highly favorable thanks to its positive associations with modernity
and because of its importance in the job market. The goal of
internationalization of higher education goes hand in hand with its
‘Anglicization’. Opinions on the popularity of English expressed by
Italian scholars are presented, including the intervention of the
Italian Accademia della Crusca in support of the use of Italian in
education. The Accademia’s stand, however, is generally more inclined
to fostering a greater respect for Italian, rather than resentment
towards English. Despite protectionist reactions, the spread of
English in Italy is generally perceived as an opportunity rather than
a threat, and efforts are being made in education to raise the
competence of Italian learners of English up to the level of their
more advanced European peers.

EVALUATION

The book offers an updated overview of lexical borrowing from English
into Italian, filling a gap in the literature on English-Italian
studies available to English-speaking readers. Although the focus is
on the Italian language, the phenomenon of language contact has been
explored in a wider sociolinguistic perspective, focusing on the
spread of English as a global language and its influence on many world
languages.

The book is clearly written and very well organized, providing a short
introduction to each topic, detailed analysis of selected examples,
and a summary for each chapter.
It is an essential reading for upper-level undergraduate students,
graduate students, researchers, and anyone interested in contact
linguistics in general, and Anglicisms in Italian in particular.

Overall, this is an excellently researched book which will certainly
inspire future research.

REFERENCES

Alexieva, N. (2008). How and Why are Anglicisms often Lexically
Different from their English Etymons? In R. Fischer & H. Pulaczewska
(eds.). Anglicisms in Europe. Linguistic Diversity in a Global
Context. 42-51. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Filipović, R. (1974). A Contribution to the method of studying
Anglicisms in European languages. Studia Romanica et Anglica
Zagrabiensia. 37. 135-148.

Filipović, R. (1996). English as a word donor to other languages of
Europe. In R.Hartmann (ed). The English Language in Europe. 37-46.
Oxford: Intellect.

Görlach, M. (2001). A Dictionary of European Anglicisms. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Görlach, M. (2002a). English in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Prof. Dr. Lelija Socanac is a retired professor of the Foreign
Language Department, Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb, Croatia.
Her research interests include contact linguistics and
multilingualism, English as a global language, language policy and
planning, historical sociolinguistics, legal linguistics, and critical
discourse analysis.



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