Estudio semántico de las interferencias inglés/español en "Gatherings from Spain", de Richard Fox

Abstract

XIX century travel literature describes Spain as one of the most attractive destinations according to the Romantic philosophy. This attraction resulted in the proliferation of books on Spain's culture which created and consolidated the widely spread topics on Spaniards and their customs in the rest of Europe, beliefs that, in some form or another, still remain to the present day. Books written in this genre usually share a comparable style and have been studied exhaustively from a literary or historic view point, although the peculiarity of the continuous linguistic interference between the author's native language and Spanish has, until now, never been the focus of research. For this reason, this thesis' main aim is the semantic research of the above mentioned interference and its impact on English language, through the study of Gatherings from Spain, written by Richard Ford in 1846.The work is divided in two main parts. Part one is concerned about the author and his context and relates his book to the different frameworks of the period which influence it, by focusing on travel literature in the XIX century and the Enlightenment antecedents about Spain and Andalusia.The second part includes the lexical, stylistic, semantic and frequency analysis of the whole corpus of linguistic interference between English and Spanish that appear in the book, grouped according to their respective associative field, and the entailing consequences in English lexis.The subsequent conclusions of this work are innovative either from a linguistic or from a cultural point of view: Firstly, because the lexical, syntactic and semantic characteristics of a style shared by most British travellers during the XIX century are shown objectively through its assessment. Culturally, because the topics that underlie this book corroborate the romantic image of Spain, through their objective enumeration throughout the text and because many of the analysed terms have finally been introduced into the English language system as borrowings from Spanish.