Introduction

This chapter establishes the linguistic focus of the present volume, lexical borrowing, highlighting both the unremarkable as well as pause-worthy products of this process. It situates the reader with respect to the phenomenon, including defining the products and the process and providing concrete examples from actual speech. It provides the sociolinguistic setting of the study (Spanish speakers and Spanish in New York City) and its participants (first generation Spanish-speaking immigrants and their Spanish-speaking children). This chapter describes the methodological foundations of the study (i.e. a quantitative variationist sociolinguistic study), the types of questions to be answered and their importance to the field of linguistics and beyond. For example, the study provides answers to questions such as: Who is most susceptible to lexical borrowing? How dependent on language proficiency is borrowing? How do borrowings spread through a particular community? And: What impact does widespread borrowing in a language community, such as that of Spanish speakers in New York, have on the Spanish language as spoken there? In addition, it situates this study with respect to investigations that have drawn on the data source it utilizes: that of the Otheguy-Zentella Corpus of Spanish in New York City, the largest stratified natural language corpus of Spanish in New York. The chapter concludes with a brief reflection on the conceptual appropriateness of the notion of ‘language membership’, upon which studies of lexical borrowing are notoriously constructed, although not always explicitly confronted.