False Anglicisms in Italian

This volume is the first comprehensive account of false Anglicisms, i.e. lexical items, such as basket, footing, mister and recordman, which are used in Italian – and many other languages as well – to express meanings that a native speaker of English would not understand, at least in certain contexts. Following a broad theoretical introduction, in which false Anglicisms are defined and classified according to morphological and semantic criteria, the book addresses issues such as the origin of false Anglicisms, their impact on Italian, their influence on the English language, and the attitudes towards their spread. The retrieval and selection of false Anglicisms are carried out through lexicographic resources as well as corpus-based and corpus-driven methodology. The volume contains a Dictionary of False Anglicisms in Italian (DFAI), which records 286 main entries providing definitions, Italian and real English equivalents, and examples taken from newspapers. The book includes a foreword by Manfred Görlach, editor of A Dictionary of European Anglicisms (Oxford University Press, 2001).