Virginia Pulcini is Full Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Torino, Italy (Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Modern Cultures). She has published in several fields of English linguistics, lexicography and contact linguistics. Her most productive research area is the lexical influence of English on Italian. She compiled the Italian entries of the Dictionary of European Anglicisms (Görlach 2001), contributed to the volume English in Europe (2002, OUP), and co-edited the volume The Anglicization of European Lexis (Benjamins, 2012). She is a founding member of the international research team GLAD (Global Anglicism Database). She was Principal Investigator of the national project “English in Italy: Linguistic, Educational and Professional Challenges” (2012 - 2016) and partner of the Erasmus+ Project “Transnational Alignment of English Competences for University Lecturers” (2017-2020). She is the author of the forthcoming monograph The influence of English on Italian: Lexical and Cultural features (2023, De Gruyter).

Keynote Lecture: English in Contact with Other Languages: Fifty Years On

English-induced lexical borrowing is at the core of research on language contact between English and other languages. This lecture will address noteworthy attempts to compare and measure the influence of English cross-linguistically over the past decades. The way different language systems integrate loanwords is conditioned by structural properties that differ across languages and language families (Romance, Germanic, Slavic and others). The circulation of Anglicisms and their typological outcomes is further blurred by the substratum of Latin and Greek, which contributed to the formation of scientific vocabularies in the past and is still responsible today for the circulation of international vocabulary. In this lecture some key aspects of a cross-linguistic comparison of the lexical influence of English will be discussed, with particular attention to typological distinctions between loan translations and internationalisms, loanwords and Latinisms, adaptations and semantic loans, hybrids and neological creations, loans and pseudo-loans. The discussion will include examples taken from the Global Anglicism Database, the most recent attempt to measure English-induced lexical borrowing across the languages of Europe and beyond.