Non-pronominal uses of it: a case study in women’s fashion magazines

Abstract

The use of English as a global language has largely affected other languages, both in general and specialized areas, particularly at the lexical level due to themassive borrowing of English words. Anglicisms are most visible in the language of fashion, where they are highly appreciated and associated to prestige and “coolness”, apart from linguistically representing the rapid advances and modernization of fashion that sometimes make languages unable to cope with the speed with which extralinguistic realities change. The present study, based on a sample of over four million words from leading fashion magazines published in Spanish, focuses on the use of itin its non-pronominal uses, that is, it aims at identifying and describing the adjectival uses of itwhich may be either directly taken from English in short phrases or compounds like it girl, or adapted to Spanish linguistic contexts as in “calzadoit”,“mas it”,“lait prenda”. Furthermore, the study also reveals new uses of it, or rather pseudo-English uses that appear in Spanish fashion magazines and which are the result of different linguistic phenomena. In particular, nominal uses like “la ‘it’ del mes”, “todas las it”or “nuestrasits favoritas” have been detected.