Un caso di contaminazione linguistica: i forestierismi nei dibattiti elettorali
A Case of Linguistic Contamination: the Foreign Words in Electoral Debates

Summary/Abstract: A decisive moment in the construction of the candidates’ ethos (Reyes 2015:59), the televised political debate also represents an opportunity for the politicians to show their competence in foreign languages. Nevertheless, the foreign words, most of them having an English origin in nowadays discourse, are sometimes an infraction to the lexical norm of the language which has an autochthonous correspondent. This study aims to a qualitative description in the perspective of the relevance theory (Sperber/Wilson 1986) for the occurrences of foreign words in electoral debates in France, Italy and Romania between 2007 and 2017. The qualitative perspective underlines the pragmatic values o fthe foreign words and integrates them in the context of the Political Discourse Analysis (van Dijk 1997) by finding the various uses and by acknowledging the linguistic preferences of certain politicians. In a contrastive perspective, there is a general tendency of the electoral discourse to using English words in Italy, as opposed to the conservative linguistic tendencies in France.

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