Abstract
The variety of English used in Gibraltar has been in contact with a number of European languages, such as Spanish, Italian, Hebrew and Arabic (Moyer, 1998: 216; Suárez-Gómez, 2012: 1746), for more than 300 years. Studies of this variety have traditionally been based on interviews and observation (e.g. Moyer, 1993, 1998; Cal Varela, 1996; Levey, 2008 2015; Weston, 2011, 2013, etc.), and a detailed morphosyntactic description is yet to be published. In this context, the compilation of a reliable Gibraltar corpus using the standards of the International Corpus of English (ICE) will constitute a landmark in the analysis of this lesser known variety of English. In the present paper we describe the ICE project and the current state of the compilation of ICE-GBR. In addition, we present a detailed comparison between the section on press news reports of ICE-GB (standard British English) and ICE-GBR, with the aim of identifying morphosyntactic features that reveal the influence of language contact with Spanish in this territory. We explore variables such as the choice of relativizer (assuming a higher preference for that in GBR, in agreement with Spanish que, the most frequent relativizer, Brucart, 1999: 490), the use of titles and pseudo-titles preceding proper names (which, as shown by Hundt and Kabatek, 2015, are very frequent in English journalese and extremely infrequent in Spanish), and the frequency of the passive voice (expected to be lower in ICE-GBR), among others. A preliminary analysis of these variables reveals that the influence of Spanish on the variety of English used in the Gibraltarian press, at the morphosyntactic level, is almost non-existent, limited to occasional cases of code-switching between the two varieties. We hypothesize that a possible explanation for this strong exonormative allegiance to British English, at least in press news reports, can be found in a strong editorial pressure to reflect the prestigious parent-variety.
Highlights
Gibraltar lies at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, with a surface of some 6 km2 and a population of 32,000 people (Census 2012)
The International Corpus of English (ICE) project was born three decades ago, after a call in 1988 by Sidney Greenbaum (University College London) for English scholars to expand the scope of computerized corpora beyond Brown and the LancasterOslo/Bergen (LOB) corpus, the American and British corpora from the 1960s that had set the standard for corpus-based linguistic studies
The data under analysis here are drawn from ICE corpora (International Corpus of English), and are intended to represent an educated standard variety of English spoken in the regions concerned
Summary
Gibraltar lies at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, with a surface of some 6 km and a population of 32,000 people (Census 2012). In the 20th century the local community has become ethnically more homogeneous, competent in both English and Spanish, and speaking Yanito, the local vernacular language of Gibraltar, defined as “an Andalusian Spanish-dominant form of oral expression which integrates mainly English lexical and syntactic elements as well as some local vocabulary” (Levey, 2008: 3; see Moyer, 1998: 216). These days an increase in the use of English at home (inter-parental situation) among youngest Gibraltarians is observed (Kellerman, 2001: 91-93; Levey, 2008: 58, 95-98; Weston, 2013).
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