Italianity through the lexicon of medicine following the example of malattia di Castellani, fregolismo e criteri di Milano

The present research arose in the context of the specialized languages and, specifically, of the language of medicine. The study focuses on the lexical level, namely on medical terminology and is conducted in an intralinguistic perspective. The first part presents the reflections on the semantic affinities and divergences between the two key terms – italianity and italianism. The second part, however, is dedicated to linguistic analysis with the aim of examining whether, and to what extent, the phenomenon of ‘italianity’ can be investigated through medical terminology. In the collection of linguistic material, extra-linguistic and merely linguistic parameters have been adopted. The extralinguistic criterion served to limit the research to the medical disciplinary field and, consequently, to the specialized language of the medical field. The linguistic criterion, on the other hand, made it possible to specify the type of lexical elements that constitute the object of the study by restricting them to the medical terminological units characterized by the presence (direct or indirect) of Italian proper names, i.e. the names in the structure of which an anthroponym (e.g. malattia di Castellani) or a toponym (e.g. criteri di Milano) appears. Only the proper names whose referent is Italian, that is those which satisfy the requirement of ‘being Italian’, have been taken into consideration. The study is based on a terminological corpus consisting of about 300 Italian terminological units attested in the various lexicographic repertoires.