Anglicisms and the Description of Cosmetic Products: A Study of a Corpus of Italian Texts

The use of English as an international means of communication has increased considerably during the years, and its influence on other languages can be recognised from the use of English-derived vocabulary. These are called Anglicisms, which are words, idioms or phrases borrowed from English and used in a sentence of another language. Anglicisms can be found in several fields, such as politics, fashion, sports, just to mention some of them, and play an important role in the spoken language, as their usage suggests. In fact, their presence in advertising, articles, and everyday language does not go unnoticed. For this reason, this study will be focusing on the influence of English on the Italian language in a specific context, the cosmetics industry. Scholars have conducted research in a variety of fields, such as those mentioned above, but the lack of information related to the cosmetics industry has led to this study. The present thesis aims to analyse the presence of Anglicisms in the description of cosmetic products, and it is divided into three chapters. The first chapter will take into consideration the literature review, examining the different types of Anglicisms; an overview of the use of lexical borrowings in Italy and the influence of English on the language of cosmetic advertising in Italy is then shown, followed by an explanation of corpus linguistics methodology. The second chapter will explain the data and methods used to conduct this study. A series of texts, specifically the descriptions of the products that are being sold to customers, have been retrieved from the websites of two Italian cosmetics brands in order to create two corpora. The third chapter will show the discussion of data, such as the lists of Anglicisms that have been extracted from the corpora. Context of use, possible translations, and quantitative data are going to be analysed. To conclude, the final results and findings will be shown and summarised.