Languages of Discovery: A Comparative Linguistic Study of English and Spanish after the Discovery of America

Abstract

This book comments on several aspects related to the Discovery of America and its consequences for the development of English and Spanish. From a comparative perspective, the author offers an in-depth study of various sociolinguistic concepts on both sides: Americanisms, the American Language, dialectalisms, vulgarisms, etc. The second part of the book is dedicated to the study of word-formation in English and Spanish after the Discovery: compounding, derivation, borrowing. Finally, two semantic fields are described and compared in English and Spanish: place-naming and crossbreeding. Languages of Discovery has as its aim to correlate different linguistic aspects about American English and American Spanish from a historical comparative perspective.