A taxonomic approach to the use of English in the Italian media

As the use of English in digital spaces continues to grow, there is an increasing amount of research focused on how it is adapted to local contexts. Proceeding from the argument that we need to go beyond studying English in isolation to investigate how it gets localized in digital settings, the purpose of the study is to investigate Instagram English teaching posts intended for an Iranian audience. To this end, we collect and analyze a dataset of Instagram posts aimed at teaching English. The research questions center on the resources which come together in these posts. Theoretically, the analysis draws on language assemblages. The findings show that English is entangled with a range of other resources and these Instagram posts emerge as engaging in edutainment, a material activity involving three interlined semiotic processes. While these processes do involve drawing from the users' L1s, they are more complex, involving a more varied set of resources than language. The social practice of edutainment comes to the fore as central, and forms are enlisted to serve this practice.

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Language contact between Italian and English: a case study on nouns ending in the suffix -ing

Meinschaefer

2023

Folia Linguistica

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The article deals with how English deverbal nouns with the suffix -ing have been imported into Italian. The focus is on the semantic characteristics of these borrowed nouns in Italian and, in particular, on the question of whether they have been borrowed not as simple sign-concept pairings but with argument and event structure. In previous research, it has been claimed that argument and event structure need to be licensed by some overt functional element. Hence, borrowed deverbal nouns should have argument structure and event structure only if they have an overt affix, in other words, only if the forms are not borrowed holistically as unsegmented words but retain internal morphological structure, implying that morphological borrowing of the affix has occurred. When a foreign affix combines with native bases of the recipient language, this is often considered an important criterion for morphological borrowing, which is clearly not the case for the suffix -ing in Italian. Here, it will be shown that contrary to expectation, numerous occurrences with argument and event structure may be found in a large Italian web corpus for a sample of English deverbal nouns ending in -ing, borrowed into (certain registers) of Italian.

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A taxonomic approach to the use of English in the Italian media

Cited by 5 publications

References 40 publications

New Anglicisms in the Ukrainian Language: Social Internet Communication Context

New Anglicisms in the Ukrainian Language: Social Internet Communication Context

Inventing a Language Online: The Practice of Edutainment in English Teaching Instagram Posts

Language contact between Italian and English: a case study on nouns ending in the suffix -ing

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