Un estudio contrastivo del léxico político español/italiano

This article presents a contrastive analysis of Spanish and Italian political lexis based on a corpus comprising the Diario de Sesiones del Congreso de los Diputados (Plenary Sessions, Permanent Deputation, and Committees) and the Diario de Sesiones del Senado de España (Plenary Sessions), complemented, for the Italian component, by the Resoconti stenografici dell’Assemblea della Camera dei deputati. The study first examines the conceptual delimitation of the notion of language for specific purposes (LSP) and its applicability to political language. From a methodological perspective, it adopts and updates the principles proposed by Robert Lado—the founding figure of contrastive linguistics—for the analysis of political language in both languages, with the aim of assessing lexical and semantic convergences and divergences between the two linguistic systems. More specifically, the study investigates the occurrence of so-called deceptive cognates (false friends), culture-specific lexical items (culturemes), modified lexical forms, correlatives, antonyms, and witness words, while also clarifying the nature of collocations and free versus restricted lexical combinations. The findings suggest that positive transfer mechanisms cannot be taken for granted, pointing instead to a relationship of cultural and linguistic homology rather than identity between Spanish and Italian. Ultimately, these results underscore the importance of developing contrastive awareness in both translation practice and the teaching of closely related languages.