<em>The Descripción geográfico-moral by archbishop Cortés y Larraz (1770) and the lexical history of Central America: some Salvadorian data</em>

Abstract

This paper aims to be an attempt to decrease the lack of studies about the lexical history of Central American Spanish, so its main goal is to analyse American lexical items (americanisms) that can be found in the chapters devoted to El Salvador in the Descripción geográfico-moral de la diócesis de Goathemala, a chronicle written by archbishop Pedro Cortés y Larraz in 1770 after a journey around his large diocese.   

After providing a general description of the vocabulary used in the book, I will analyse lexical items that can be considered as americanisms from a dynamic and usage point of view (Company 2010; Ramírez Luengo 2015); specifically, I will take into account issues like subtypes of americanisms, semantic fields where they are used and the utilization of indigenisms as an example of language contact. The final purpose of the analysis is to detect diatopically marked words and to describe the dialectalization of this linguistic level that can be discovered at the end of the 18th. century.