Spammare senza pietà - Corpus based analysis of English, un-acclimatised verb loans in Italian and creation of a reference lexicon
Authors: Anna Fantini (Università di Pavia, 2016)
Topic: Lexical and Semantic Resources and Analysis

Abstract
We describe the lexical resource created to investigate the semantic changes of 90 English, un-acclimatised verb loans in Italian. Final results and interesting observations concerning the annotation task are discussed.

Introduction
The case of language borrowing was investigated in depth by AUTHOR, who argues that a linguistic loan is an interference phenomenon, connected with contact and mutual influence of different languages. According to his study, the motivations behind the origin of a loan lie in the individual act of a speaker or of a group of speakers. The need to resort to a foreign alternative derives from the prestige held by the latter against an equivalent word in the mother tongue of the speaker (or from the absence all together of an alternative, as in our work: “Se mi vede, Miki mi banna (<to ban)” vs. *“Se mi vede Miki mi bandisce”). Facts show that language borrowing is particularly common among specialized languages, more so if they are linked to technical contexts. This is extremely visible within the computer context. The main focus of this paper is the informal variety of Italian as used by communities of online video-gamers, computer experts and amateurs, forum users, etc.; a specialized language linked to technical context populated with partially integrated and un-acclimatised English verb loans. These kinds of (mostly) lexical influences are so recent that their structure is hardly stable, and the process of integration – graphical, morphological, phonetic, and lexical – in the language is still in progress. For instance, they tend to retain the phonetic property of the original word, especially of the lexical root (to spawn > spawnare /spo’nare/). The new word serves as an alternative – usually a hyponym – of an already existing term1. As for the concept of loan acclimatisation, the literature states that it involves the role of the new term in the target language. Therefore, Gusmani speaks of acclimatisation only with regard to the lexicon and its connection with speakers’ usage: the more they familiarise with the loan, the more the latter gets acclimatised. It follows that – for very recent, scarcely integrated loans – the majority of speakers, as well as linguistic authorities, do not perceive the influence of English as an enrichment of the lexical heritage but mostly as a nuisance. If it is true that a number of reports describe the interference of English over Italian as an impoverishment, some attempts have also been made to study the less acclimatized loans themselves. It is thus of interest to examine why this kind of loan infiltrates the Italian language, how the speakers cope with the new word and what is the semantics of the loan in the target language. The aim of the present paper is to give a detailed account of how the meaning of a verb loan changes (and if it changes) in the target language and to offer a reliable source of lexical information in the form of an electronic lexicon built for the occasion. Section 2 details the method used to collect suitable data; section 3 illustrates the structure and functions of the lexicon; section 4 provides the results of our analysis as well as the annotation task performed with our data; section 5 discusses our findings and section 6 finally provides a conclusion.

Conclusion
The peculiarities of each group of annotators lead to a thought-provoking analysis of the tagsets and the semantic notions themselves. The analysis of the semantic behaviour of the loans unveils deeper questions on the speaker’s strategy: if it is easier to reuse a loan whose meaning already exists, why are there also loans with new or diversified meaning? Furthermore it came to our attention that yes, many loans are linked to the informatics/technical context (rippare, sloggare, etc.) but others can be considered as hyponyms of already existing Italian verbs, whose meaning is rather general (cheattare for barare, whinare for lamentarsi, etc.). It is possible to already discern synonymic and antonymic relations between the loans themselves: craftare, farmare 2, spawnare 1 or sbuggare-buggare. Finally, the most productive verb classes in our corpus are the verbs of change of state, the creation verbs and the verbs of killing.