Morphosyntactic borrowing from and variation attributed to English in Japanese young women’s fashion magazines

Abstract This study examines the use of English grammatical elements in fashion magazines targeting young women published in Japan. A total of 48 tables of contents from three different magazine series were analysed using a list of categories created on the basis of pre‑analysis. These categories include the following: functional words (prepositions, auxiliaries, conjunctions and pronouns), determiners (articles, possessive apostrophe ‑’s and pronouns), inflectional attachments (the plural morpheme ‑s and third‑person singular present morpheme ‑s ), and complete sentences. The analysis also found locally constructed forms that comprise an extra plural s , such as gaaruzuguruupu ‘girls group’, in addition to all the listed items. Additionally, the analysis observed approximations to the English system through the attachment of inflectional morphemes and the non‑attachment of Japanese adjective morphemes (e.g. HAPPY NEW ME 1 ). This voluntary incorporation of morphosyntactic elements from English, despite the absence of any linguistic obligation in Japanese, is characteristic of this expanding‑circle context. The nativised forms comprising the distinctive use of s (e.g. gaaruzuguruupu ‘girls group’) indicate more than simple lexical borrowing, as they emerged from the systematic application of an L2 grammar rule. This not only indicates highly advanced code‑mixing but also morphosyntactic transfer from English to Japanese. People’s orientations towards hybrid mixes, exposure to external equivalents, negotiation between exnormative and endonormative forms upon use, actual usages and the subsequent processes of nativisation/stabilisation could be interrelated and require further research.