Anglicismos en el campo del videojuego en español: un estudio de corpus del “foro3djuegos.com”

Abstract

The presence of English lexical items is pervasive in many different areas of our daily life. The field of video games is not an exception, and this paper attempts to reveal the degree of use of Anglicisms in an online forum addressed to Spanish- speaking video gamers. Additionally, this study focuses on the types of adaptation that these English borrowings have undergone when used in Spanish, and the pragmatic functions that these Anglicisms fulfil. A corpus of 100,340 words were extracted from the online forum Foro3Djuegos. After that, the corpus was inserted in the analysis tool AntConc), which was used to filter the Anglicisms found in the corpus. This process of analysis provided a sample of fifty-one English lexical items and the contexts in which they were used. Findings reveal that the most frequently used Anglicisms are the adapted ones (twenty-five items), followed by the pure or non-adapted English lexical items (sixteen), some clippings (six items) and four cases of English interjections. Both the frequency of use of these loanwords along with the three main pragmatic functions: referential, expressive and textual, have been analyzed in this paper. The inconsistency of the spelling of these loanwords has also been discussed