Oh! What a humanitarian war! A comparative corpus-assisted study of humanitarian umanitario in English and Italian opinion articles

The present article presents a contrastive case study of the adjective humanitarian in English and umanitario in Italian in the context of newspaper opinion articles. It explores dictionary definitions of these words, and investigates their collocates both in reference corpora for English and Italian and in specialized corpora of opinion articles from the press in English and Italian. While the adjective appears to be semantically neutral, it collocates with both positive and negative words. In the context of military conflict, corpus investigations reveal increasing scepticism on the part of opinionists in English and Italian newspapers as regards the good intent of “humanitarian” interventions.