Anglicisms in Italian budget laws: a corpus-driven diachronic study

The presence of English language elements in other receiving languages has become more and more prominent in the last decades. The so-called Anglicisms have permeated many specialised domains, in addition to general language. The present dissertation aims to study the presence of Anglicisms in a specific type of text, namely the Italian budget laws covering a period from 2009 to 2024. The purpose of the thesis is not only to provide quantitative data on the number of Anglicisms in the corpus, but also to describe the domain to which they belong, their path of integration (or not-integration) in the Italian language and the presence of Italian equivalents, if any. The research is a corpus-driven analysis conducted on a specifically built Italian monolingual corpus that aims to examine English borrowings quantitatively and qualitatively in a precise type of legal document. The analysis is diachronic since it aims to show the pattern of usage of Anglicisms in the years considered, and more specifically, where possible, the greater or smaller use of specific Anglicisms in the fifteen years taken into account. This type of analysis aims also to study the presence of Italian equivalents, if any, and the development of possible new laws and new social, cultural, political and linguistic phenomena resulting from the entry into the Italian language of the English terms considered.