Resumen de The ICE Project Looks at Iberia: The International Corpus of Gibraltar English
Elena Seoane Posse, Cristina Suárez Gómez, Lucía Loureiro Porto
As the global language it has become, English has indigenised in a wide array of territories, which now speak a distinct variety of this language. The pioneering International Corpus of English (ICE) project began in 1990 with the aim of creating comparable corpora of English worldwide for their study (Nelson 2006, 736-740). In 2014 the current research team was appointed to compile the Gibraltar component of the ICE project, and this paper aims to contextualize such an endeavour from a sociolinguistic and methodological perspective. We discuss the shortcomings we need to face when aspiring to collect particular ICE text categories in Gibraltar as well as when determining what a true Gibraltarian is. The paper, then, explains our struggle to keep a constant balance between rigour, in following the general ICE framework and design, and pragmatism, which will allow us to adjust to the local Gibraltarian reality.
