Building a Corpus of Newspaper Language to Study False Anglicisms in Italian

The present article is the description of a project carried out during a three-month stay at the Bergen Advanced Training Site in Multilingual Tools (BATMULT) of the Universitetet i Bergen (UiB), Norway. The project described here will become part of a PhD thesis entitled A Dictionary of False Anglicisms in Italian, which is in progress at the Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy. The thesis deals with the Italian phenomenon of false Anglicisms from a lexicographic perspective, particularly in view of a future dictionary of false Anglicisms in Italian. The project developed at the Aksis center (Avdeling for kultur, språk og informasjonsteknologi), formerly HIT (Senter for humanistisk informasjonsteknologi), of the UiB can be roughly divided into three different though connected parts. The first consists in a preliminary list of potential false Anglicisms based on lexicographic sources. The second part, more challenging and innovative, aims at retrieving new false Anglicisms by exploiting computational tools and techniques. The goal of the third and final step is to select from the preliminary list only those items which can be considered proper false Anglicisms.