Ideological connotations in financial terminology: an English-French-Italian study from ‘hedge funds’ through ‘fondi speculativi/fonds spéculatifs’ to ‘fondi alternativi/fonds alternatifs’

During the worldwide economic crisis of recent years, hedge funds have been accused by the investment community of exacerbating tensions on the financial markets. According to some, however, hedge funds are merely a scapegoat for the financial universe. T he aim of this presentation is four-fold. First, to address the nature of this negative judgement from a range of perspectives – conceptual, ideological, operational and linguistic –on the basis of an analysis carried out on a comparable multilingual specialised corpus, made up of ten sub-corpora; second, to survey the universe of the operational activities and strategies of hedge funds and the analogies and differentiating aspects between hedge funds and fondi speculativi and fonds spéculatifs; third, to map the different connotations of the concept of speculazione/speculation and discuss the choice of the denomination fondi speculativi adopted by the Italian legislator, in the absence of an ad hoc law on hedge funds at a Community level; and fourth, to measure the change in ideological connotations when moving from the denomination fondi speculativi and fonds spéculatifs to fondi alternativi and fonds alternatifs and assess the degree of linguistic awareness of the Italian and European legislators compared to that of experts from the financial sector, academics and politicians.