The pragmalinguistic dimensions of cultural borrowing. A case study in Cuban Spanish

Abstract

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.