PhD thesis - School of Informatics - University of Edinburgh

Chapter 2. Background and Theory 22
Wellness (spa). Native German speakers are not always aware of this and may believe
that they are genuine anglicisms that can be used with the same meaning in English.
Other pseudo-anglicisms, which are made up of one or several English morphemes, do
not actually exist in English, e.g. Beamer (video projector), DJane (female DJ), Dog-
walk (catwalk at a dog show) Fitnessstudio (gym) or Pullunder (sleeveless pullover).
The examples show that pseudo-anglicisms represent the productive use of English by
German native speakers. In many cases, the connection between the pseudo-anglicism
and its source language item(s) is obscure. Although linguists disagree on whether
pseudo-anglicisms can be classed as borrowings, it is clear that such instances would
not exist in the receiver language if they had not been derived from lexical items in
the source language. For example, Onysko (2007) considers them as anglicisms, but
not borrowings, as they are made up of English forms but are equally the result of
receiver language inherent creation. Their frequent occurrence, however, indicates the
widespread influence of English in German-speaking territories. With respect to auto-
matic language identification, pseudo-anglicisms are treated as English inclusions.
The final aspect of language mixing taken into account is the rising number of
English proper names in German caused by the increasingly international nature of
the working environment. English names of companies like Google or Germanwings,
organisations like Greenpeace or Fertility Center Hamburg, events like Fullmoon Fes-
tival or Love Parade and band names like Fury in the Slaughterhouse or Absolute
Beginner appear frequently in German. Such English proper names are manifesta-
tions of language contact whereby a specific concept is either transferred with its name
into the receiver language or inherently created in the receiver language using English
forms (Onysko, 2007). In terms of the classification of contact types, proper names
appear as borrowings even though they are not consistently recognised as anglicisms
by linguists. For example, Yang (1990) regards proper names, and citations related to
English speaking countries as a sub-class of anglicisms. Busse (1993) also considers
English proper names as anglicisms. In corpus studies, they are sometimes excluded
(e.g. Onysko, 2007; Tautenhahn, 1998; Gentsch, 1994; Yang, 1990) but often included
(e.g. Abresch, 2007; Hilgendorf, 2007; Corr, 2003; Hedderich, 2003; Berns, 1992;
Galinsky, 1980; Koekkoek, 1958) in the analysis. Such studies tend to be limited to
organisation, event, brand and product names and such like, but exclude person and
location names. In this thesis, the same distinction is made and only English names of