Anglicisms and Corpus Linguistics

The ever-increasing and multi-faceted influence of English on other languages, and especially on other languages’ lexis and phraseology, is the undisputed topic of the present volume. Nine contributions concerning each a different European language (Norwegian, French, Finnish, Danish, Spanish, Polish, German, Czech and Italian) form a representative sample of this linguistic phenomenon across Europe.

Contact linguistics has established itself as a field of study and research that encompasses phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicology, semantics and pragmatics (Winford 2007). After decades where the main concern was to retrieve, list and analyse mainly lexical borrowings from English, attention has been turned to pragmatic aspects related to Anglicisms (Fiedler 2017; Andersen 2014; Onysko & Winter-Froemel 2011, 2012; Winter-Froemel 2017) and, more recently, to cognitive contact linguistics (Zenner, Backus & Winter-Froemel 2019). The focus has also shifted from single-word units to more complex lexical units such as compounds, collocations and other multi-word units (Fiedler 2014; Oncins-Martínez 2014; Witalisz 2015; Andersen, in this volume).

The publication of The Anglicization of European Lexis (Furiassi, Pulcini & Rodríguez González 2012) represented a real milestone in the development of English-based and English-induced lexical and phraseological research. It embraces a large range of topics such as Anglicism detection, Anglicism typology, pragmatic distinctions, lexicographic description, formal and grammatical adaptation, phraseological loan translations and Anglicisms in specialised discourse. Likewise, Pseudo-English: Studies on False Anglicisms in Europe (Furiassi & Gottileb 2015) went a step further in the elucidation of how European languages adapt, modify and reinterpret lexical material coming from English. The present volume broadens the scope of these two previous works with new research studies on several of the aforementioned topics and other innovative research from a European cross-linguistic perspective.

The introduction of the concept of allogenism (Humbley 2015) can cast some light on the analysis of the influence of English on the lexis of other languages insofar as there is still a thin line between English pseudo-loans and English-induced lexical creation in the receptor languages (Winter-Froemel 2009). In this respect French words such as tennisman (En. ‘tennis player’) or babyfoot (En. ←7 | 8→‘table football’) would not be considered pseudo-loans, or even loans stricto sensu, as they have not been borrowed from English purely and simply. The same argument applies to hybrids. As has unequivocally been pointed out, ‘[a]‌llogenisms and hybrids share the distinction of being made up of at least one element from another language, and not being loans at all’ (Humbley 2015: 51). This classificatory discordance stems from two entirely different theoretical positions: one analyses matters from a strictly linguistic viewpoint, the other adopts the extralinguistic perspective (cognitive, social, cultural or a mixture of the three) to insist on the English-like appearance of false Anglicisms (Campos Pardillos 2015; Aleš Klégr & Ivana Bozděchová, in this volume). Further research on false Anglicisms from a contrastive perspective, either between languages of the same family (Renner & Fernández Domínguez 2015) or from different language families (Bagasheva & Renner 2015), is needed in order to compare theoretical and methodological approaches for the same or similar phenomena.

The Global Anglicism Database Network (GLAD) is an ambitious large-scale research project aimed at fostering cooperation concerning the influence of English on the largest number of world languages. The results of the titanic work of all the scholars involved in this project not only will complete and update the data collected by Görlach (2001) but will also delve into a range of controversial or unresolved issues around Anglicisms mainly from an all-encompassing linguistic perspective.

The present collection of papers adopts an interdisciplinary approach and strongly advocates in favour of corpus-aided research on Anglicisms through a wide spectrum of corpora, text archives and databases.

The chapter by Gisle Andersen focuses on the influence of English phraseology in Norwegian and makes use of the Norwegian Newspaper Corpus for synchronic analysis and of the National Library’s Text Archive to study the diachronic development both of phraseological borrowings and phraseological loan translations. To empirically test whether Norwegian phrases such as når det kommer til and tingen er at are loan translations of ‘when it comes to’ and ‘the thing is that’, respectively, the author relies on a diachronic-contrastive corpus method. The main issue is to discern whether a multi-word unit in the receptor language has been loan-translated from the donor language (English, in this case) or it has had a parallel development, that is, whether they are both a product of polygenesis (Piirainen 2012, 2016).

Ramón Martí Solano’s contribution affords new insights into the extent of lexical and phraseological borrowings and loan translations in the Francophone press. By means of the introductory phrases comme disent les Anglais (as the English say) and comme disent les Americains (as the Americans say) a large ←8 | 9→number of single-word and multi-word units, either as borrowings or as calques, have been retrieved from the online archives of sixteen dailies and weeklies for a 10-year time span (2009–2019). Very frequent non-adapted borrowings include momentum, bankable and soft power, but the most interesting result is the great number of multi-word borrowings that are used in the Francophone press such as at the end of the day, Business is business or The show must go on, mainly for stylistic purposes.

Sociolinguistic aspects of pragmatic borrowings and the comparison with their native equivalents in Finnish are at the bottom of Elizabeth Peterson, Ylva Biri and Johanna Vaattovaara’s contribution. The analysis of the English swear words ‘shit’, ‘fuck’ and ‘damn’ and their Finnish equivalents was carried out using the online social forum Suomi24 as a corpus as well as the audio matched guise test (Lambert 1967) and a self-report online survey from 446 speakers of Finnish. Results are unambiguous: ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’, although marginal in use compared to their Finnish counterparts, are highly integrated in general discourse and grammar. Besides, age is the only significant factor for using these English swear words, gender and education being non-significant.

Henrik Gottlieb’s chapter is concerned with the methodological criteria that should be used in order to avoid nonce and irrelevant Anglicisms in the GLAD database. Positing a dichotomy between Anglicism richness and Anglicism density it follows that temporal, cognitive, lexicographic and statistical criteria must be both taken into account and coalesce for Anglicisms to be considered in general use.

English-induced lexical creation in Polish, mainly through derivation, compounding and word-formation, constitutes the field of research in the chapter by Alicja Witalisz. The author lays great emphasis on carrying out diachronic research so as to confirm the actual loan status ascribed to a large number of pseudo-loans or hybrid loans. A cognitive approach to linguistic borrowing is also advanced to account for the name-finding process implicit in all the lexicogenetic processes, be them English-sourced or English-induced. Hybrids such as leasingobiorca (leasing holder) and leasingodawca (leasing provider) are treated as English-induced word formations in Polish and therefore not as pseudo-loans. Equal treatment is given to sejmoholik (a person addicted to watching Parliament debates), a native derivative that makes use of the English combining form ‘-holic’.

Jaime Hunt investigates the role that collocation and semantic preference have in the actual use of Anglicisms in German. The author draws on the research carried out by Kettemann that analysed the contextual use of three Anglicisms together with their native equivalents (‘cool’ / kühl, ‘shoppen’ / einkaufen and ←9 | 10→‘Event’ / Ereignis or Veranstaltung). Based on the oral corpus Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch (FOLK), the author demonstrates the non-redundancy of Anglicisms and highlights the fact they do not replace native words as collocates differ semantically and stylistically between native words and Anglicisms.