1st Edition

Lexical borrowing and deborrowing in Spanish in New York City Towards a synthesis of the social correlates of lexical use and diffusion in immigrant contexts

By Rachel Varra Copyright 2018
    194 Pages
    by Routledge

    194 Pages
    by Routledge

    Lexical Borrowing and Deborrowing in Spanish in New York City provides a sociodemographic portrait of lexical borrowing in Spanish in New York City.





    The volume offers new and important insights into research on lexical borrowing. In particular, it presents empirical data obtained through quantitative analysis to answer the question of who is most likely to use English lexical borrowings while speaking Spanish, to address the impact that English has on Spanish as spoken in the city and to identify the social factors that contribute to language change.



    The book also provides an empirical, corpus-based-approach to distinguishing between borrowing and other contact phenomena, such as codeswitching, which will be of interest to scholars of language contact and bilingualism.

    Chapter 1: Introduction 



    Chapter 2: The Lexical Borrowing Database: Classifying lexical contact phenomena 



    Chapter 3: The corpus and analysis 



    Chapter 4: An overview of lexical borrowing behavior in Spanish in New York City 



    Chapter 5: Immigrant generations in focus 



    Chapter 6: Innovation, reproduction and the dissemination of lexical borrowings in Spanish in New York City 



    Chapter 7: Deborrowing: Flagged lexical borrowings in Spanish in New York City 



    Chapter 8: Synthesis and application of findings 



    Appendix A: Stratification of the Otheguy-Zentella Corpus of Spanish in NYC 



    Appendix B: Excerpts from the Otheguy-Zentella Corpus by referring chapter 



    Appendix C: Results of the homonymy test 



    Appendix D: Criteria for lexical borrowing by part of speech category

    Biography



    Rachel Varra is Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and in Linguistics at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA.