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.
Highlights
This paper is part of a much larger ongoing research project1 which approaches a corpus of romance fiction novels from a multidisciplinary perspective
When comparing the figures in both tables, we can notice that there is a tendency for the works in sample A to include a higher number of Hispanicisms than those in sample B, except for two romances in the latter, those by Airlie (1958) and Danbury (1973) in which a considerable number of Spanish words are employed
The plots in these two novels develop mainly in the islands, while in the rest of the romances in this sample, part of the action takes place in other locations, both in Britain and in continental Spain. These factors may explain the contrast between the considerable number of Spanish words inserted in these two novels and the relatively few Hispanicisms included in the other works in sample B
Summary
This paper is part of a much larger ongoing research project which approaches a corpus of romance fiction novels from a multidisciplinary perspective. We will examine a total of 16 romances taken from the corpus that is being compiled for Project FFI2014-53962-P in order to explore the dynamics of English/Spanish codeswitching, focusing on both their types and the socio-pragmatic or discourse functions that these cases of language mixing seem to play. To the best of our knowledge, no previous research has focused on codeswitching in popular romance fiction novels, a sub-literary form that has always been doubly stigmatized for being both popular and female-oriented (Sánchez-Palencia, 1997). As indicated in the title, our aim here is to explore the dynamics of the use of Hispanicisms in this type of English fictional texts
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