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Article published In:
International Journal of Language and Culture
Vol. 5:1 (2018) ► pp.112–129

The pragmalinguistic dimensions of cultural borrowing

A case study in Cuban Spanish

 | University of Alicante
The concept of ‘cultural borrowing’ has been associated with the concept of interlinguistic borrowing, and not necessarily cultural diffusion, which might reveal typological disparities and conceptual incongruence. This article is thus aimed at examining the concept of cultural borrowing, in which its referential component is essential to determine the degree of cultural impact. To have a better understanding of this concept, a multidimensional categorization has been established to describe the leading features and components of the process of cultural assimilation. These dimensions, namely ‘unknown referent’, ‘semantic novelty’, ‘semantic plasticity’ and ‘pragmatic plasticity’, have been used to depict the cultural anglicization of Cuban lexis. Also, based on a dictionary-based compilation, a ‘cultural index’ has been established to shed more light on the multifaceted nature of cultural borrowing and ‘cultural density’, suggesting that such an index is not proportionally related to lexical productivity and frequency, but to the importation of unknown-referent-based cultural loans.
Keywords: cultural borrowing, anglicisms, pragmatics, Cuban Spanish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Cultural borrowing: Origins and concept
  • 3.Cultural borrowing: A four-dimension concept
    • 3.1Unknown referent (UR) in the target language
    • 3.2Semantic novelty (SN)
    • 3.3Semantic plasticity (SP)
    • 3.4Pragmatic plasticity (PP)
  • 4.Cultural opacity
  • 5.Cultural density
    • 5.1Cultural density: A case study in Cuban Spanish
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 May 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.17003.san
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