Presence of anglicisms in the field of pharmaceutical science

Abstract

This piece of research intends to examine the use of anglicisms within the field of pharmaceutical science, which does not seem to be exempt from the use of foreign words. Bearing that aim in mind, a corpus has been excerpted from three different journals of this field, among other sources. Secondly, the corpus has been broken down according to different kinds of anglicisms (non-adapted, adapted, hybrids and calques). The findings reveal that the presence of non-adapted or pure lexical units is higher than that of the calques, hybrids and adapted anglicisms. In a lower hierarchy, two analysis of the corpus have been carried out: firstly, discerning different degrees of speciality or technicality distinguishing among technical, semitechnical and general use terms, and, secondly, considering different semantic fields (pharmacy/medicine area, business and marketing, manufacturing/distributing process and quality controls, IT and general terms). Eventually, in order to determine the reasons that lead to the employment of these anglicisms in Spanish, a threefold distinction has been made examining their pragmatic function (referential, textual and expressive).