Calques and Loanwords from English in Italian Specialized Press. An Investigation on the Names of Sports.

Abstract

Within specialized discourse in the Italian language sports journalism communication is certainly one of the richest in anglicisms. This study investigates the influence of English on Italian sports newspaper lexicon with particular reference to the denominations of sports disciplines which are loanwords and calques from English. The corpus studied is made up of the three main Italian sports dailies - “La Gazzetta dello Sport”, the “Corriere dello Sport” and “Tuttosport” - which have been observed in their on line version through the second sixth-month period of 2006. The attention will be focused on the terminological aspects of Italian sports language with respect to: types of borrowings and calques; possible use of Italian equivalents for English sports denominations, including acronyms; synonyms; influence of English on Italian sports press language according to the type of sports discipline, and possible pragmatic, historical and cultural reasons. In order to carry out the linguistic analysis for this paper, the Zanichelli dictionary (1998), by Ragazzini, has been used - the only existing Italian English / English Italian paper sports dictionary so far. For the investigation of the historical-cultural aspects about the use of the terminology observed, the Compendium of Sporting Knowledge by Trevor Montague and the on-line encyclopaedia wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/) have been looked up.