The influence of English on U.S. Spanish: A corpus-based study on the use of lexical anglicisms in the Hispanic digital press of the Northeast

Abstract

This dissertation deals with the influence of lexical anglicisms on the Spanish used by the Hispanic digital press of the Northeast of the U.S. I first create the theoretical framework which serves to review and define the concept of anglicism and its types, and to describe in detail the variety of Spanish used by the members of the Hispanic community. Next, I focus on the headlines of the publications selected and extract a corpus of approximately 3,000 anglicisms which I analyze according to parameters like spelling, grammatical category, semantic field, type of borrowing, frequency and scope. The findings reveal that most of the anglicisms studied include unadapted proper names and basic noun phrases covering mainly the semantic fields of sports, social issues and technology and have an international scope.