Intended communicative effects of using borrowed English vocabulary from the point of view of the addressor: Corpus-based pragmatic analysis of a magazine column

Abstract

This paper presents the findings of a small-scale, pilot, corpus-based research conducted on a corpus of 36 Ja, igrač! ('I, Gamer!') columns from the magazine Svet kompjutera (Computer World), published between 2009 and 2012 in Serbia. The goal of the research was to develop and test a methodological apparatus that would make it possible to determine what communicative purpose licenses the use of borrowed English words and phrases (i.e. anglicisms) in a specialized non-English text. For this purpose, each occurrence of an English word or phrase in the corpus was annotated in accordance with the classification of anglicisms (Prćić 2005) and each sentence in which it occurs was annotated for its type (statement, question or exclamation), polarity (positive or negative), emotional charge (emotionally charged or emotionally neutral) and communicative intention (speculative, argumentative or factual). The analysis of the thus annotated corpus focused on finding a correlation between the frequency of anglicisms in a particular combination of sentence features. The initial results of the analysis of the corpus suggest that the devised methodology is scientifically valid and it also shows that anglicisms have the highest frequency of occurrence in speculative sentences and that they are more frequent in emotionally charged sentences than in neutral ones, especially so in factual sentences.