English and lexical inventiveness in the Italian linguistic landscape

Abstract

The study of the linguistic landscape has seen a growing interest in recent years, focusing on written information publicly available in a given territory, city or area (Landry & Bourhis 1997). English is widely present in the linguistic landscape worldwide (e.g. Cenoz & Gorter 2006, 2008; Shohamy & Gorter 2009; Shohamy et al. 2010), often in its lingua franca role (Bruyèl-Olmedo & Juan-Garau 2009), and Italy appears to be no exception (Ross 1997; Schlick 2003; Griffin 2004; Gorter 2007; Coluzzi 2009).This paper investigates examples of lexical inventiveness involving English in a set of data gathered in the linguistic landscape of some cities and towns in Veneto (Northern Italy), each with different though complementary contextual characteristics. Signs containing English, either monolingually or in combination with Italian, were selected and analysed as to lexical creativity, as well as semantic shifts/extensions. The data shows that English is often employed both in monolingual and in hybrid/bilingual processes at several linguistic levels, from orthography to word-formation (Huebner 2006), testifying to its pervasive presence in expanding circle contexts, either as a (globalized) symbol of modernity or in appropriating linguistic practices. Keywords: English in the linguistic landscape; lexical inventiveness; word-formation; English and local languages; English as a Lingua Franca

“Battle” between languages over the public area in the tourism destination city of Bali: lexicological and linguistic landscape perspectives

“…One possible explanation for this is that hybrids may be viewed as inherently creative, as they result from the unusual merging of two languages. It is in line with Vettorel and Franceschi (2013), who found that the few examples of wordplay in the data were, for the most part, constructed using only one language (monolingual). With regard to the use of Balinese on LL in tourist destinations in Bali, this study found that the top-down category gained a much higher percentage than the bottomup category.…”

Revisiting attitudes toward English in present‐day Italy

“…There is no trace of 'Englishness' in this word and therefore it should be considered an internationalism. 4 Examples taken from Vettorel and Franceschi (2013). 5 On the Nespresso webpage the famous Italian influencer Chiara Ferragni features in some videoclips, in which she talks about the Milano collection of coffee capsules.…”

“…Studies on the Italian linguistic landscape have been carried out in Rome (Gorter, 2007) and in other cities and towns in Northern Italy (Vettorel & Franceschi, 2013, 2019). Although English is not the only foreign language populating the urban landscape, the number of signs that use English or combine English and Italian amounts to about a quarter of all signs in Gorter's study.…”

“…Language on display is the locus where creativity and playfulness can best be exploited (Vettorel, 2013; Vettorel & Franceschi, 2013, 2019). Foreign languages are traditionally used as attention‐getters to associate a product with the country of origin and to convey ethnocultural stereotypes of the advertised product.…”

English and other languages in Italian advertising

“…The presence of English as a language of instruction is increasing at all levels of education, including tertiary level, where entire programs may be offered with English as the medium of instruction (EMI) (Pulcini, 2015, p. 112). Data from studies on the Italian linguistic landscape appear to support a capillary presence of English in the Italian context (Coluzzi, 2009;Gorter, 2007;Griffin, 2004;Vettorel & Franceschi, 2013). Borrowings seem to be pervasive in both spoken and written Italian with 'many English words […] imported into Italian in order to fill a lexical gap in some "trendy" fields such as fashion, advertisement and youth slang' (Demata, 2014, p. 142), but they are also found in specialized languages and in information media such as newspapers (Demata, 2014;Pulcini, 2018;Robinson, 2006).…”