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 Routledge Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics Series

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

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.