Anglicisms in Italian as Alerts to Greenwashing: A Case Study

As the economic crisis tightens itself upon businesses, many companies, especially those whose activities tend to be considered unfriendly towards the environment, have tried to ‘green market' themselves, that is, they have worked on their brand image in order to reposition it as more interested in and caring about environmental issues. The attempt at making environmentalism a payable business venture, however, may induce companies to claim to be more sustainable than what they really are. This phenomenon, called ‘greenwashing', is notably related to car manufacturing, energy (electricity and gas providers), tourism and petrol. This paper analyses the use of Anglicisms in Italian in texts taken from ERG's website. This Italian petrol company has recently carried out an important brand restructuring, redesigning its logo and modifying its petrol stations by colouring both in a strong, vibrant shade of green. We argue that Anglicisms are an integral part of ERG's green marketing discourse strategy and that their use can be considered a persuasive rhetorical device. In addition, through an analysis of two Anglicisms in particular, i.e. ‘stakeholder' and ‘performance', which are investigated in terms of their semantic referent and their co-occurrence with other linguistic and semiotic resources, we also argue that these Anglicisms may lend themselves to being used manipulatively. We finally suggest that such an analysis may be useful in the attempt to develop critical tools to help the recipients distinguish legitimate marketing persuasion from manipulation.