This research aims at examining the influence of modern English on the lexicon of the press of areas representative of the major Hispanic groups in the U.S.: Chicanos, Puerto Ricans and Cubans. With this goal in mind, a classification and comparative study of all the loanwords from English found in the Spanish language press of the three areas was carried out, as well as an analysis of the morpho-orthographic adaptation of these same loanwords in all three linguistic varieties. This research focused only on what in the field of languages in contact are called loanwords or prestamos, which consist in an outright transfer of a lexical element from one language into another. These loanwords, of course, change to adapt themselves to the morphology of the recipient language. Since the data was taken from written sources, the loanwords also had the ortographic adaptations that the recipient language generally demands. The sources for data used in this study were two issues each of the major newspaper from the largest metropolitan area of each group: Los Angeles, New York, and Miami. All the loanwords in these three newspapers were classified according to area, thematic field, users of the language, and parts of speech. A comparative analysis was carried out with the resultant classification, as well as an analysis of the morpho-orthographic adaptation of the loanwords in the three recipient lingustic varieties. The results of this research show that there are differences between the three varieties as far as lexical borrowing from English is concerned. While the morpho-orthographic processes that the loanwords in this study undergo in all three linguistic varieties are basically the same, in Mimai the number of verbs taken as loans was significantly smaller. All other differences are non-linguistic in nature. They occur in the thematic fields which are more receptive to loans, or in parts of the newspapers writen by types of users of the language with different degrees of receptivity, i.e., journalists, advertising professionals, or general readers of the newspapers.

Spanish mood selection has long been of interest to grammarians. Much work has been done in a traditional semantic approach to mood use and, more recently, an attempt has been made to find a syntactic solution to the problem, using among others Transformational Grammar and X-bar Theory as models. This dissertation analyzes the problem from the viewpoint of acquisition. In chapter 1, I review the basic syntactic models of mood selection in embedded noun clauses and conclude that the structure of embedded noun clauses is better predicted by semantic type than by mood. The second chapter discusses possible models of first and second language acquisition and hypothesizes that the two may be similar in the acquisition of the Spanish subjunctive.