Anglicisms in the Spanish contemporary press

Abstract

This PhD thesis covers the study of Anglicisms in the Spanish contemporary press. It establishes the following objectives: 1. To propose a more accurate definition of the concept of Anglicism 2. To establish a comprehensive typology of Anglicisms in 21st century written Spanish 3. To illustrate this typology by means of real usages of Anglicisms found in the Spanish contemporary press 4. To carry out a qualitative study consisting of a philological‐linguistic analysis of a broad number of Anglicisms employed in Spanish newspapers 5. To develop a quantitative study by applying corpus linguistics methodology to the analysis of the presence of Anglicisms in the Spanish press, in order to: 5.1. Present a list of the most frequent Anglicisms in the Spanish contemporary press 5.2. Arrange a classification of thematic fields in terms of Anglicisms frequency of use 5.3. Set up a classification of Spanish newspapers in terms of Anglicisms frequency of use 6. To compare the strengths and weaknesses of applying each of the two approaches mentioned above to the study of Anglicisms in the present‐day Spanish press Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the linguistic phenomenon of English loanwords, which is highly spread nowadays among a great number of languages, being Spanish one of them. Furthermore, an accurate definition of the term Anglicism is offered. Chapter 2 presents an extensive review of the literature that has been published so far on borrowings in general and Anglicisms in particular. Chapter 3 proposes a comprehensive typology of English loanwords in present‐day Spanish. In chapter 4, this taxonomy is exemplified by means of an illustrative glossary consisting of 1,130 Anglicisms that have been extracted from the Granada local daily Ideal. These loanwords are analysed in relation to orthographic, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and etymological aspects. In chapter 5, the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual is employed in a systematic and consistent way in order to look up a total number of 2,198 Anglicisms. The following parameters are fixed in the searches: geography: Spain, chronological period: 2001 – 2004; medium: press ‒the sample contained in the CREA is a representative and balanced selection of texts from 55 different sources‒. Afterwards, the whole amount of concordances obtained (15,734) are classified according to, on the one hand, the newspaper where each of them appears and, on the other hand, the thematic field to which the text (where each of them is employed) belongs. Thanks to this classification, results in terms of percentages and frequencies per thousand words are achieved. Chapter 6 supplies a comparative study between the strengths and weaknesses of the two approaches (qualitative vs. quantitative) adopted in chapters 4 and 5, respectively. Finally, chapter 7 presents the conclusions arrived at in this PhD thesis as well as possible future avenues opened by this piece of research.