Advertising as Multilingual CommunicationAcknowledgementsI would like to thank the following people for their help in the writing of this book: Jill Lake and all the staff at Palgrave Macmillan for their assistance; my colleagues in the Department of Languages and Cultural Studies and the Centre for Applied Language Studies in the University of Limerick, in particular Dr David Atkinson for his careful reading and valuable criticism; my former colleagues in the Department of Languages and European Studies, Aston University, in particular Dr Sue Wright, Professor Rüdiger Görner, Professor Nigel Reeves and Dr Gertrud Reershemius; the University of Limerick Foundation for its generous funding; the companies and individuals who cooperated in the research for this book; and, finally, my parents, family and friends. HELEN KELLY-HOLMESixIntroductionIt is breakfast time, I am listening to a national commercial station in Ireland, and the presenter is announcing details of a competition to win a holiday in Italy. The competition is sponsored by Buittoni pasta. Competitors have to complete two tasks on the air: first of all they have to say an Italian phrase in the most convincing accent they can; secondly they have to judge whether or not different celebrities are ‘real’or ‘fake’ Italians, defined in this context as being born in Italy or elsewhere, based on their names. The competition is followed by a commercial break. This can be seen as the explicit market text section o