LANGUAGE CONTACT IN THE MEDIA DISCOURSE: ANGLICISMS IN SECTION LEISURE IN THE NEWSPAPER “LA PROVINCIA”

Abstract

The presence of English is undeniable in various areas of Spaniards’ daily lives, and the domain of leisure activities is not excluded of such a trend. This paper examines the presence of Anglicisms in sections: “Life and style”; “Culture, leisure and society” and “Sports” of the digital edition of the newspaper La Provincia (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria) during the period from 1st March to 31st May 2019. The use of Anglicisms has apparently been increased throughout the last decades, considering a similar previous analysis (Luján- García, 1999). The compilation of a corpus of 207 Anglicisms reveals that the section “Life and style”, which compiles news of various fields (fashion, beauty, people, pets, gastronomy) presents the highest percentage of Anglicisms (65.2%). In the second position, “Culture, leisure and society” contains a percentage of 21.7% of the compiled corpus, and this is followed by “Sports”, with 12.9% Anglicisms of the sample. In qualitative terms, some examples of particular uses of the examined Anglicisms are studied in context, considering the whole sentence where they occur, in addition to the analysis of the orthographic markers employed, which tend to be quite inconsistent. Eventually, the pragmatic functions of these Anglicisms are discussed: specialized language, referential, expressive and textual functions, which will be illustrated with examples excerpted from the corpus.