Hispanismos en el discurso romántico de Harlequin y Mills & Boon. Ámbitos temáticos y funciones socio-pragmáticas

Abstract

This paper studies the Hispanicisms employed in 25 English popular romance fiction novels published by Harlequin and Mills & Boon. The texts belong to the corpus compiled for Research Project FFI2014-53962-P, which focuses on an interdisciplinary analysis of romances set mainly in the Canaries (Spain), but also in other Atlantic islands. In these romances, most of the authors resort to code-switching, i.e. the insertion of Spanish words, phrases and sentences, as a literary strategy. After offering a description of the socio-cultural framework of this type of works and a brief review of some studies on Hispanicisms, we will examine the semantic fields and the socio-pragmatic functions that these Spanish words and expressions seem to play in the English discourse. Our findings reveal that the Hispanicisms used in the texts are not merely restricted to the semantic field of ‘romance and love’, and that the socio-pragmatic functions they play go beyond the referential function. We suggest that the variety of functions detected seem to contribute to the performance of a kind of macro-function of representation of the bilingual contexts and identities the novels portray.