The Treatment of Grammatical Information on Anglicisms in Some Italian Dictionaries

This paper addresses the treatment of grammatical information on non-adapted Anglicisms in some Italian grammars and monolingual and bilingual Italian-English dictionaries. The analysis considers number inflection, gender attribution, and grammatical class given to one-word and multi-word units. Starting from the norms given by grammars and dictionaries, a countercheck is carried out with the grammatical categories assigned to Anglicisms in authentic language use, based on a word list of 1,005 non-adapted English loanwords from a forthcoming dictionary of Italian Anglicisms. The analysis shows that there is a lack of consensus on the grammatical treatment of Anglicisms in the dictionaries considered, and, only for the category of number, reference norms and corpus-based data partly match, whereas, for gender and word class, norms are rather scanty. Because actual usage is far from consistent in this area of lexis, the grammatical information given by dictionaries can be placed half-way between norms and usage.