Lexical borrowings and structural calques in modern Spanish: Do they have a potential for language change?

Abstract

This essay addresses the question of lexical borrowing and structural calques documented in modern Spanish, especially in the case of English-based innovations that are broadly used in the United States. In a global context in which multilingualism appears to have become the norm rather than the exception (Tucker, 2001), the community of researchers has been focusing on the study of contact-induced phenomena. Scholarly publications from the last decade have shown increased interest in analyzing the diversity of contact phenomena as well as their occurrences and arguable potential for reconfiguring language systems (Ortigosa, 2010). Contact phenomena are not to be studied in isolation, but in tandem with the sociolinguistic reality of the languages involved. In merely quantitative terms, the dominant or majority language is usually the one that contributes innovations to the dominated or minority language (e.g., Spanglish—Otheguy & Stern, 2010). In recent years, an impassioned debate has arisen among scholars that, based on variationist comparatism, argue for and against the fact that contact-induced phenomena involve change (either grammatical or structural) in the target language (Blas Arroyo & Tricker, 2000; Torres Cacoullos & Travis, 2016). Ultimately, this essay intends to provide an inclusive, yet contrasting definition before drawing necessary conclusions concerning the aforementioned debate.