English Borrowings in Italian dubbed animated films: the case of the Toy Story films

The aim of this thesis is to examine the influence of the English language on the Italian language of dubbing. In particular, this analysis is based on a diachronic study of the four aminated films of Toy Story. I analysed both the original and dubbed dialogues of the four Toy Story films (Toy Story, 1995; Toy Story 2, 1999; Toy Story 3, 2010; Toy Story 4, 2019) searching for traces of both direct and indirect borrowings in the Italian dubbed dialogues. As regards direct Anglicisms, I chose to analyse the discourse marker okay, the emotive interjection wow, the informal interjection yo and the emotive interjection whoa. With regard to indirect Anglicisms, I searched for instances of calques from English quoted in the literature about the language of dubbing such as eccitato/eccitante; amico; lascia che + verb in the subjunctive; già; ci puoi scommettere/puoi scommetterci; prego; realizzare; assolutamente. The results of this study seem to suggest that, despite the notable increase in the number of the direct Anglicisms analysed in the dubbed dialogues of the more recent films, this has not impoverished the variety of Italian equivalents. As for indirect borrowings, they do not present a high frequency in the dialogues analysed and other expressions are usually preferred.