The Spanish Lexicon of Baseball

Rezensionen / Stimmen

The Spanish Lexicon of Baseball: Semantics, Style, and Terminology fills a scholarly void in Hispanic linguistic studies but will be of interest to a diverse audience, from lexicographers and learners of Spanish to baseball fans and sports enthusiasts. This volume is well overdue, and it will likely serve as a model for similar books regarding other sports. -- Rafael Orozco, Louisiana State University Quirky, engaging, and comprehensive, this corpus-based study of baseball usage in Spanish-language journalism is a welcome addition to the literature on Latin American baseball and a thoughtful consideration of lexical variation, metaphor, and syntactic and discursive factors in register formation. -- Brendan H. O'Connor, Arizona State University; author of <i>Multilingual Baseball: Language Learning, Identity, and Intercultural Communication in the Transnational Game</i> This volume is not a glossary of Spanish baseball terms, nor is it a treatise on linguistic variation, although it embodies the best features of both. Students of Spanish and baseball aficionados alike will be immediately engaged. The authors spin a fascinating narrative of baseball as played and commented by Latinos, complete with regional and social variation, all of which makes the book just plain fun to read. -- John Lipski, Pennsylvania State University Anyone interested in the language of baseball or Spanish lexicon and language contact will find this book to be a thorough, accessible, and compelling analysis of Spanish baseball terminology. Anyone who is a Spanish-speaking linguist and baseball fan won't be able to put it down! The book explores the myriad ways that writers enrich the lexicon of cronicas, or Spanish-language game summaries, from use of Anglicisms and metaphor to novel creations and beyond, and provides a wealth of examples from all areas of the game. The analysis is contextualized not only within the authors' love and thorough knowledge of the game but also against the backdrop of the growth of Latinos in baseball and the complex realities faced by Spanish-speaking players in a country and sport where an English monolingual ideology still reigns. -- Holly Cashman, University of New Hampshire