Economic Discourse: Main Peculiarities in English and Spanish

Abstract

The paper highlights modern economic discourse peculiarities in English and Spanish. Everyday life is determined by the economic situation on the national, regional and international levels. Thus, the economy plays a leading role in any society. The presented research aims to outline language changes on the lexical and morphosyntactic levels that exist in the modern English and Spanish economic discourse. The article introduces the discussion about English overwhelming influence over all other languages in the economic and business area. Nowadays, as a result of globalization, economic discourse has become uniform everywhere. Nevertheless, the uniformity level can differ even in one language group. For instance, Italian is much more receptive to borrowings from English than Spanish or French. At the same time Spanish is evaluated in this research as a purist language example as it has changed to a lesser extent than other languages on the lexical level. This feature is clearly represented by Spanish economic discourse metaphors. For example, famous English metaphors “bear” and “bull” correspond to Spanish “bajista” and “alcista”. At the same time some Spanish metaphors coincide with English ones (the Debt Service (Eng.) – el Servicio de la Deuda (Sp.), country risk (Eng.) – riesgo país (Sp.)). Syntactic structures analysis enabled to investigate several English and Spanish economic discourse phenomena. One of the most important phenomena involves changes of grammatical category, especially the nominalisation of verbs in order to indicate processes as well as of adjectives in order to indicate conditions and qualities. As a nominalisation process consequence, ellipsis, Passive Voice and intransitive verbs employment is observed. In general, it is proved that Passive Voice is used more in English than in Spanish. Nevertheless, Passive Voice is used in Spanish economic discourse to emphasise its impersonality, i.e. subject in the sentence is not expressed by an author but by the action itself. The use of personalisation and metaphors helps to explain abstract notions, i.e., accountability, value, validity, welfare (Eng.) as well as la responsabilidad, valor, la validez, el bienestar (Sp.)