Exploring the dynamics of English/Spanish codeswitching in a written corpus

Abstract

This investigation is part of a much larger ongoing research project which approaches a corpus of popular romance fiction novels from a multidisciplinary perspective. The paper focuses on the usage of Spanish words and expressions in the English written discourse of two samples of romances taken from the corpus we are compiling for Research Project FFI2014-53962-P. When analyzing the occurrences of Hispanicisms in the samples, we will specifically address the issues of both their forms and the different socio-pragmatic functions that these cases of language switching seem to play. It is only recently that scholars have studied the patterns of codeswitching in literary writing, but, to the best of the author's knowledge, no previous research has focused on codeswitching in this particular subgenre, which has always been doubly stigmatized for being both popular and feminine.

Hacia un glosario de hispanismos en un corpus de novela rosa inglesa contemporánea

“…Otro género relevante es el de la novela rosa, un tipo de literatura popular que, aunque denostada por la crítica por su condición de popular y femenina (Sánchez-Palencia, 1997), cuenta con unos índices de venta imbatibles a nivel internacional. En estudios anteriores (González Cruz, 2015, 2017a, 2017b) hemos comprobado que, cuando están ambientadas en zonas exóticas de habla no inglesa, estas obras tienden a incluir muchos extranjerismos como parte de su técnica narrativa. Este es precisamente el caso del corpus de novelas objeto de estudio en el Proyecto de Investigación FFI2014-53962-P, en cuyo marco hemos examinado los 30 títulos que enumeramos más abajo como fuentes primarias de este estudio.…”