Anglicisms in financial Italian: A corpus-driven analysis of Italian press from 2008 to 2020

This research focuses on the identification and analysis of the terminology of Anglo-American origin, the so-called Anglicisms, related to the lexicon of the 2008 global financial crisis that have entered the Italian special language of economics and finance since the outbreak of the crisis in 2008 to the year 2020. The research is a corpus-driven analysis conducted on a specifically built monolingual corpus that aims to quantitatively and qualitatively analyse the Italian special language of economics and finance and its features. The corpus constitutes of four Italian financial newspapers addressed both to an audience of experts and professionals, in the case of the specialised journals Milano Finanza and Italia Oggi, and to an audience of laypersons, in the case of the newspapers of general reach Il Sole 24 Ore and La Repubblica. For each newspaper 25 articles a-year have been selected, for a total of 1,3000 articles. Furthermore, the qualitative and quantitative conclusions drawn upon the data extracted on the anglicisms investigated have been further supported by the construction of an Anglo-American monolingual reference corpus, balanced with respect to the Italian corpus in terms of the period of time considered, from 2008 to 2020, to the varied audience addressed, and to the number of articles collected. In fact, the reference corpus constitutes of 25 articles a-year selected from four English financial newspapers published from 2008 to 2020; additionally, the newspapers that constitute the reference corpus have been geographically selected, as two of them are British, The Financial Times and City A.M, and two are American, i.e. Investors’ Business Daily and American Banker.