La diacronía del español en Texas, 1732-1801: una aproximación a su estudio léxico

This dissertation examines the lexicon of Spanish in Texas from the 1730s to the early 19th century, aiming to characterize the lexical features of this variety. Despite the growing interest in United States Spanish, its diachronic study—particularly during the Spanish colonial period—remains a gap in current literature. Consequently, the main objective of this research is to establish a documentary corpus of 18th-century Texan Spanish to analyze its diatopically marked lexicon. The resulting corpus, DocTex18, comprises 210 administrative and legal documents (1732–1801) from the Bexar Archive Online, transcribed following CHARTA guidelines. Drawing upon the theoretical frameworks of Paredes García (2021) and Ramírez Luengo (2017), the analysis evaluates 57 diatopically marked terms, moving beyond mere etymology to consider their pragmatic usage. Findings reveal that while indigenous loanwords (e.g., jacal, piragua) reflect New Spain’s influence, the lexical configuration is primarily characterized by the semantic modification of existing terms rather than the incorporation of new ones. These results suggest that the Spanish in Texas exhibits distinct tendencies compared to other Hispanic territories, particularly in its cattle-related vocabulary and morphological adaptation. Finally, the study acknowledges that these findings may be conditioned by the nature of the DocTex18 corpus, proposing that future research incorporate diverse textual genres to refine this dialectal characterization.