False Italianisms in English Dictionaries and Corpora

Although false borrowings – probably due to their reduced quantitative impact on the lexicon – have been usually disregarded by linguists and lexicographers, they undoubtedly bear witness to the creative potential of language contact. After clarifying the terminological issues involved, this article, focusing on false Italianisms in English, aims at defining the phenomenon and devising a typology. The presence of false Italianisms in British English and American English is also quantified and assessed by means of a corpus analysis based on previous meta-lexicographic investigations. Different degrees of prototypicality of each false Italianism are determined, the congruities and/or mismatches between dictionary entries and corpus concordances are verified, and the quantitative differences regarding the use of false Italianisms in the two varieties of English considered are highlighted.