Il nonprofit come erogatore di servizi pubblici in Italia e negli Stati Uniti: bandi di finanziamento e requests for proposals a confronto

The language of nonprofit organizations has originated considerable interest among applied linguists in recent years, mainly with reference to persuasive discourse for fund raising purposes. These studies, which combine genre analysis with corpus linguistics, have led to the creation of two corpora, the ICIC Fundraising Corpus, developed at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis (USA), and the SITLEC Fundraising Corpus, developed at the University of Bologna at Forlì. This contribution aims to extend the focus of these studies beyond fundraising organizations, to include grantmaking foundations. The analysis is focused on two requests for proposals, concerning medical research, one by Fondazione CARIPLO, and one by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which are compared from the structural viewpoints.