María Isabel González Cruz

Language and Travel: Spanish Vocabulary in British Travel Books

The aim of this paper is to offer an interdisciplinary approach to the study of travel writing. In particular, what we attempt to do is to apply a sociolinguistic point of view to a number of travel texts, which, undoubtedly, situate the traveller—and, consequently, the reader—in the fascinating context of intercultural exchange. As Henriquez (1995, p. 33) notes, in their work travel writers ‘try to re-shape the cultural exchange between . . . races and traditions’. Since culture and language are so closely intertwined, travel accounts could be used as a source to examine the cultural and linguistic influences experienced by writers as a result of their daily contact with the members of the communities they visit.

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

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.

Conciencia Sociolingüística e Hispanismos en un Corpus de Novela Rosa Inglesa

Resumen Este artículo estudia desde una perspectiva sociolingüística una muestra de 14 novelas rosa inglesas que están ambientadas total o parcialmente en las islas Canarias (España). Las obras, que pertenecen a un corpus más amplio, están salpicadas, en mayor o menor medida, de palabras y expresiones en español, ya que algunos personajes son de habla hispana. El objetivo principal del trabajo es mostrar la conciencia sociolingüística de las autoras, mediante la identificación de los mecanismos que estas utilizan para recrear el contexto bilingüe de las novelas y construir la identidad lingüística de los personajes. Tras un análisis cuantitativo y cualitativo de los textos, los datos obtenidos parecen confirmar la existencia de una conciencia sociolingüística que se expresa por medio de estrategias de representación, que incluyen el uso del metalenguaje y del cambio de código. Además, con los hispanismos recopilados aquí iniciaremos las labores de elaboración de un futuro glosario, lo que nos llevará a plantearnos el posible papel de este tipo de textos como canales para la difusión internacional del vocabulario español, dado su gran número de lectores en todo el mundo.