New Perspectives on Languages in Contact

2. Structure and content of this volume

Most of the studies represented in this volume refer to lexical anglicisms used in the Hispanic community, especially in the peninsular or European Spanish. They are cultural products, which are mainly developed due to reasons of prestige and snobbery, to which globalization and the growing prestige of English undoubtedly contribute.

Although the greatest contribution of English to the Spanish lexicon took place in the second half of the 20th century, its imprint in the second half of the 19th century was significant and worthy of attention, with the cultural fashions that appeared at that time, as Javier Medina highlights in his article “Aspectos socioculturales del anglicismo en España durante el siglo XIX: de high life y sus adláteres semánticos”. This chapter complements the historical vision already advanced by F. Rodríguez in chapter I “Aspectos históricos. La introducción y el registro de los anglicismos en español”, from his recent book Estudios sobre el anglicismo en el español actual: una visión panorámica. (Peter Lang, 2022, pp. 21–24).

Reviewing the bibliography of Anglicism, it is immediately obvious that the general trend has been for a descriptivist methodology, which is why the normative recommendations included in style books are appreciated. In this volume, two of the signatories emphasise this perspective, although with different treatment. Alberto Gómez Font, “Anglicismos resistentes y vencedores: los que ganaron la batalla a los libros de estilo”, and Jesús Castañón Rodríguez, “Los anglicismos deportivos en los libros de estilo de medios de comunicación de España”.

Continuing in a descriptive perspective, one aspect that should be highlighted in the field of writing is the emergence in recent years of research (articles and theses) on Anglicism in the women’s magazines. That is why the contrast represented by the article by Mª Jesús Rodríguez Medina entitled precisely “Estudio de la presencia del inglés en las revistas para hombres en España: análisis comparativo” is striking due to its originality.

Also based on the press, the article by David Giménez-Folques “Presencia del inglés en las revistas gráficas satíricas”, emphasises on the role of the counterculture of the 1970s, the era of the Spanish “movida”, which contributed to promoting subversive and innovative language.

The Anglicisms in Spanish examined throughout this publication, as in the two above-mentioned that preceed, are of the “raw” or direct borrowing, although semantic loans and calques are less visible, and even less perceptible are the syntactic ones. Of this last class, it is worth mentioning one in the making, on which Montserrat Martínez’s chapter revolves, “The woman behind the artist. Un nuevo caso de anglicismo sintáctico en español”. Her corpus-based study analyzes a recent Spanish construction which is a formal and semantic replication of an English pattern (the woman behind the artist).

All of the contributions mentioned so far concern the lexicon of peninsular or European Spanish and have been registered in dictionaries since the 1990s, as indicated. However, the first dictionary of Spanish anglicisms, the precursor of all those that appeared later, was published half a century earlier, in 1950, in Panama, by Ricardo Alfaro, with a largely pan-Hispanic corpus, and despite these methodological limitations, it had a great influence on the Spanish speaking world. The Panamanian philologist Martín Jamieson reports on this in a recent review (“Re-visión del Diccionario de anglicismos de Ricardo J. Alfaro en el siglo XXI”).

Another aspect worthy of highlighing in the current bibliography, just as in this volume, is that a majority of the loans analysed are of the “unimembre” type (Emilio Lorenzo’s terminology), that is, they consist of a single lexical unit. David L. Gold’s “The Polysemous Spanish Noun safacón ~ zafacón: A Borrowing from English or a Native Spanish Coinage?,” the first treatment of any length or depth of the word in question, grapples with the difficulty of etymologising a word which, on one hand, could be entirely of English origin and, on the other, could consist of three Spanish morphemes none of which comes from English.

On the other hand, we must not forget phraseologisms, to which are dedicated the chapters written by Delfín Carbonell, “Bilingual phraseological lexicography: the meeting of two cultures”, and Ruth Breeze and Manuel Casado Velarde “Apuntes para un análisis comparativo de la fraseología relativa a la persuasión en inglés y en español”.

Most publications on Anglicisms, both in Spanish and other languages, are based on written corpora, sourced from data from newspapers and magazines, hence the uniqueness of Juan Gómez Capuz’s chapter dedicated to “Anglicismos en el español oral y colloquial”, with a sociolinguistic methodology.

In relation to the comparison of anglicisms with the native lexicon obtained through translation, Goretti García Morales, in her chapter “Tratamiento del anglicismo en traducciones automáticas español-inglés”, points to the problems that arise with computer programs when dealing with the connotative meaning.

The studies on loans in overseas areas deserve special mention in this volume. Here, María Isabel González Cruz, drawing on a very long career in research on Canarian Anglicisms, with an ancient tradition due to the commercial contacts maintained by the islanders with the British migrants in past centuries, returns to the subject to verify the knowledge and use that is still made made of them today by the young generations of Canarian university students.

Likewise, Silvia Betti, one of the great specialists in the area of Spanglish and Spanish from and in the United States, within the context of bilingualism in that country, offers an overview of the linguistic mixture resulting from “intimate” contact of Spanish and English, especially in certain areas of the United States. Betti’s chapter presents some theoretical foundations, research and part of the results of studies carried out over the years on these topics.

Also focusing on this area is Isabel Álvarez’s study “El léxico del fútbol en la prensa estadounidense en español” in which she demonstrates, with empirical data that, contrary to what one might think, the reports on soccer in the US press you are not riddled with Anglicisms but rather show a preference for the Spanish term with a higher frequency than that found in Spanish-speaking countries.

2.2. A second subset of topics focus on the lexical contact produced by other languages, starting with those spoken in geographically and culturally neighbouring countries such as France and Italy. John Humbley, in his article “Peer-produced encyclopaedias disseminating loan neology: crowdsourcing and crowdfunding in French and Spanish” examines the varying treatment by these two languages when borrowing and adapting the terminology derived from such concepts.

Alicia Roffé, a slang scholar, in her article “Créativité lexicale et anglicisme dans l’argot de la drogue français”, looks into the creativity French shows in the language of drugs users.

And Pedro J. Mogorrón, with his chapter “ Analyse lexicale des expressions figées avec des zoonymes en espagnol et en français” looks into the lexicon of zoonyms as an area fertile in phraseology in Spanish and French owing to the close ties.

As for Italian, Virginia Pulcini, in “The ordinal superlative in Italian and English: A morphosyntactic calque” examines one particular syntactic pattern imported into the Italian language and the different semantic relations that are established among the elements of the phrases in the two languages.

In “The use of English in job advertisements in Turkey”, Andreu van Hooft and his colleagues show the great extent of the penetration of English in the field of advertising, even in a very different linguistic context, just as it happens in other European languages like Dutch and Spanish. This fits in with the increase in the spread, influence, and presence of English in Turkish from 1950 to the present, which can be explained by the modernization and westernisation of Turkish society and the growing relevance of international communication in Turkey.

Finally, Amanda Roig-Marín, in her chapter “Nueva aproximación al uso de palabras inglesas en textos administrativos en latín medieval”, explores the links between words borrowed from Middle English, as used in administrative texts, highlighting among other features the use of the definite article which was inexistent in the Latin of that time.