Spanish borrowings in American slang and their semantic fields

Abstract

This introductory presentation explores the main semantic fields of Spanish borrowings used in contemporary American slang, a growing part of informal English lexicon used in the United States. Semantic fields are a serviceable tool in lexical studies, providing an insight into what members of a given community regard as socially and culturally important; they are especially telling in case of slang borrowings. This presentation explores such fields based on quantitative analysis of expressions extracted from a sizable database of citations from various sources such as press, television, film, literature, and conversations with native speakers, collected during field trips to the United States.