Macaroni English goes pragmatic: False phraseological Anglicisms in Italian as illocutionary acts

Taking the notion of pragmatic borrowing as a starting point, the aim of this article is to assess the pragmatic salience – more specifically the ability to perform illocutionary acts – of the two false phraseological Anglicisms found in Italian, i.e. fly down and I know my chickens. Typical of what may be referred to as macaroni English, false phraseological Anglicisms are Italian-made idiomatic phrases which look and sound English, but do not exist or are used with a different meaning in the English language. Examples are extracted from Italian newspaper archives and web-based corpora; in addition, a qualitative analysis is carried out by means of lexicographic sources, combining data from monolingual dictionaries of English and Italian, Italian-English bilingual dictionaries and dictionaries of idioms and slang. This study includes the frequency of the false phraseological Anglicisms under scrutiny, the typical contexts in which they occur, suggested Italian translation equivalents, as well as the indication of the corresponding illocutionary acts performed. Despite the low quantitative impact of false phraseological Anglicisms on Italian, their attestation further demonstrates how English itself not only is undoubtedly Italians’ favorite donor language, but also acts as a model which inspires English-like phrasemes, hence showing the openness of the Italian language to the pervasive presence of English in everyday usage. •Translating Italian idioms into English may lead to false phraseological Anglicisms.•False phraseological Anglicisms are recent phenomena typical of the Italian language.•False phraseological Anglicisms may be considered instances of macaroni English.•The idiomaticity of false phraseological Anglicisms makes them polysemous.•Illocutionary uses confirm the pragmatic salience of false phraseological Anglicisms.