Spanish/English Contrasts: A Course in Spanish Linguistics (review)

This highly readable and often engrossing book is ‘a scholarly description of the Spanish language and its differences from English, with an emphasis on applied linguistics’ (xiii). It does not attempt to teach the skills of linguistic analysis, for which the reader is referred to an introductory text on general linguistics; rather, it provides comprehensive coverage of most aspects of the Spanish language.

By far, the majority of the book is accessible to the reader without knowledge of Spanish, exceptions being occasional examples and occasional quotes from Spanish-language linguistic works, sometimes as long as a paragraph, that are not translated. Also, starred (ungrammatical) forms are sometimes given without either a corresponding grammatical form or an explanation of what makes them ungrammatical, apparently on the assumption that it’s obvious. However, I did not find these to interfere with the overall readability of the work.

The first four chapters cover phonetics and phonology, including stress and intonation. The next nine chapters cover syntax and (primarily) verbal morphology. Two chapters then cover the lexicon and (primarily) nominal morphology, and the final chapter covers pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and discourse. (This does not mean that discussion of sociolinguistic issues is restricted to a subsection of a single chapter—indeed, they are covered extensively topic-by-topic in the remainder of the book, primarily with respect to regional variation but also with respect to social class, etc.; in fact, the sociolinguistic thread that runs through the entire book is one of its most interesting aspects.) An English-to-Spanish glossary of linguistic terminology appears in an appendix, as do a listing of phonetic and phonological symbols and a phonological feature matrix for both languages.

One feature of the book that could stand improvement in the next edition is the illustrations. Though there are not many, they frequently leave something to be desired, either due to mediocre quality (such as the illustrations of the vocal tract in the chapters on phonology), difficulty, misleading character, or incomprehensibility. For example, contrary to the ‘picture worth a thousand words’ thesis, Whitley’s prose exposition of the facts described in Fig. 16.6 is actually far more easily interpretable than the figure itself.

W does a good job of presenting difficult points of analysis quite clearly and, perhaps more important, of showing why they are interesting. As a linguist, I was disappointed when my baby brother took a course in Spanish linguistics in college and found it crushingly boring. I suspect that if he had been exposed to the materials in this book, he would have had an entirely more positive experience.