The Spanish Lexicon of Baseball: Semantics, Style, and Terminology
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Overview
The Spanish Lexicon of Baseball: Semantics, Style, and Terminology draws on nearly 6,000 published MLB game summaries to explore the contours of baseball terminology in Spanish. Organized in a logical sequence that corresponds to various aspects of baseball (field of play, player positions, getting on base, types and modes of hits, scoring, runs-batted-in, umpire involvement and calls, pitching, and defense), the work combines narrative style and illustrative examples with keen lexical analysis. The result is an entertaining and informative volume that is neither folksy nor linguistically overcomplicated.
Chapter 1 – Why a Vocabulary for el Béisbol?
Chapter 2 – Dictionaries, Data, Words, and Meanings
Chapter 3 – Getting Started: Equipment, Field, and Player Positions
Chapter 4 – Hits and Other Ways to Get on Base
Chapter 5 – Home Runs
Chapter 6 – Grounders, Liners, and Fly Balls
Chapter 7 – Hitting the Ball: The Crack of the Bat
Chapter 8 – Runners on Base, Scoring, and RBI’s
Chapter 9 – Pitchers and Pitching
Chapter 10 – Innings and Outs (and Getting it Right)
Chapter 11 – Defense
Chapter 12 – Style: In the Game and in the Story
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.
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.
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.
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 crónicas, 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.
- Title: The Spanish Lexicon of Baseball: Semantics, Style, and Terminology
- Authors: John Chaston, Robert Smead
- Publisher: Lexington Books
- Print Publication Date: 2022
- Logos Release Date: 2022
- Pages: 248
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781498591232, 9781498591225, 1498591221, 149859123X
- Resource ID: LLS:9781498591232
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-21T23:19:42Z
John M. Chaston is associate professor emeritus of the University of New Hampshire.
Robert N. Smead is associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Brigham Young University.