Anglicisms in the discourse of Alitalia's bailout in the Italian press

This paper describes the use of Anglicisms and false Anglicisms in the press representation of the financial crisis, bailout and privatization of Alitalia between August 2008 and January 2009, the period of time which coincided with the airline’s bankruptcy and acquisition by CAI, a consortium of Italian investors coming from different fields of the Italian business and finance community. The aim of the study is to establish if and to what extent the use of Anglicisms by the two most widely read Italian newspapers, in their reports on Alitalia’s crisis and privatization, may have impacted on the transparency of the information provided by the Italian press. The study relies on a specialized newspaper corpus assembled from two mainstream Italian daily newspapers, Repubblica and Corriere della Sera, and it is part of a wider project that includes the study of the keywords and metaphors (Fusari 2010 and 2011) used in the press coverage of this news story in Italy, Britain and the United States. The results show that, in the coverage of this news story, new Anglicisms are often left undefined, or provided with an inappropriate Italian equivalent. Some of these under-defined, or wrongly defined lexical items are economic and aviation terms that describe concepts of paramount importance in the framing of Alitalia’s crisis and privatization. We therefore argue that the use of Anglicisms, in these corpus data, may have contributed to covering up, rather than clarifying, some aspects of Alitalia’s crisis.