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.