De Héroes y Villanos: Semantic and Lexical Borrowings from English into Spanish

Abstract

The presence of English as a global language in the lexicon of the languages of Europe is undeniable, Spanish being no exception to this general trend. The increasing impact of English on the European Spanish word-stock is evidenced by semantic and lexical borrowings. The aim of the present article is to study such semantic and lexical borrowings from English into European Spanish. In order to carry out the research, examples were retrieved from the sub-corpora of tourism and fashion, both part of the ANGLICOR corpus and its associated database. Following identification, the examples were analyzed qualitatively following Gómez Capuz’s classification (2004). The results of this analysis reveal, on the one hand, the fact that semantic borrowings may belong to the category of adjectives as well as the category of nouns. In the case of lexical borrowings, on the other hand, only nouns or noun groups, following various patterns, were recorded.