A Pragmatic Approach to a Corpus of Anglicisms Used in Canarian-Spanish Digital Headlines

Abstract

This paper examines a corpus of 1710 headlines with at least one Anglicism taken from the Spanish digital newspaper Canarias 7, published in the Canary Islands. The headlines, which were collected between March 1st 2019 and June 30th 2020, illustrate the use of a total of 677 different Anglicisms. The study follows the relatively recent shift from formal towards pragmatic aspects in the analysis of linguistic borrowings, underlining their stylistic motivations or pragmatic functions and confirming the high impact English is currently having on the Spanish language, more specifically in the Canary Islands. The work focuses on the analysis of the pragmatic functions and the effects that the Anglicisms collected seem to produce in digital journalese. The results prove the pragmatic nature of many of the phenomena the headings illustrate, such as the need of contextual background for adequate interpretation, the role of pragmatic marking with Anglicisms used with a primarily referential or expressive function and the use of Anglicisms for brevity and precision or to indicate attitudes, such as humour, word-play, connotations of modernity and/or euphemism. In addition, there are a few cases of headlines with presuppositions and implicatures, as well as headings with pragmatic Anglicisms, i.e., those involving the transfer of “interjections, expletives, discourse markers and focus-marking devices, which are external to propositions but contribute as signals of how an utterance is to be understood in its communicative context” as Andersen (2014: 22) puts it.