Efficiency in lexical borrowing in New York Spanish

Abstract

One manifestation of a general drive for efficiency in communication is the tendency to shorten high-frequency words and phrases. In situations of language contact, the drive for efficient communication is intensified. The demonstration of efficiency hinges on the simple observation that not all the words of a receiving language are displaced, and on the detailed observation of which words are retained and which are replaced by loanwords. Many loanwords fill a conceptual gap, but many do not; this study focuses on the latter. It is proposed that these loanwords instantiate efficiency in language behavior, as the borrowing process replaces comparatively longer words with comparatively shorter ones. On average, the length difference between displaced native words and borrowed loanwords is much higher than that between retained native words and potential loanwords that were not borrowed. To investigate this process of selective borrowing driven by efficiency, English lexical insertions were extracted from the spoken Spanish of bilingual Latinos in New York and compared with two control corpora. These results indicate that the lexical borrowing process targets pairs of words that result in especially large savings in word-length and spares those where borrowing would produce little or no savings, demonstrating that efficiency is a significant factor in explaining borrowing behavior.