Exploring the Spanish Language (review)

Would that we had books like this for all languages! Divided into ten chapters, this treatise presents all of the information a linguist specializing in Spanish should know. Impeccably organized, the material has been refined via use in the author’s course, ‘Introduction to the structure and varieties of modern Spanish’.

Ch. 1, ‘Introduction’ (1–6), presents the basic notions of prescriptive and descriptive linguistics, pedagogical rules, standard language and the notion of prestige, and the variation found in Spanish dialects. This material serves to whet the prospective student’s appetite. Ch. 2, ‘The sounds of Spanish’ (7–43), is a thorough treatment of Spanish phonetics and phonology with germane comparisons to British English; for example, initial /t/ is aspirated in English but not in Spanish (22). In exploring the parallels of stress in English and adjective position in Spanish, one notes the distinction of los mansos corderos ‘the gentle lambs’ vs. los corderos mansos ‘the gentle lambs’.

Ch. 3, ‘Spanish words and their structure’ (44–66), summarizes some aspects of derivational and inflectional morphology. In relating words such as hierro ‘iron’ and its corresponding adjectival form férreo ‘made of iron’, Pountain explains that the latter is a loanword from Latin ferreus (47). One interesting suffix commented on is -udo ‘often [having] the meaning of having the noun in question in abundance’. Thus from barba ‘beard’, one derives barbudo ‘bearded’, and from nariz ‘nose’, narizudo ‘big-nosed’ (49). The latter has a doublet in -ón—narigón (52).

Ch. 4, ‘Spanish sentences and their structure’ (67–94), comments on Spanish as a ‘pro-drop’ language (68), impersonal verbs (68–69), reflexivity (77–78), interrogatives (80), imperatives (80–81), word order (81–84), complementation (84–86), infinitives (89–90), gerunds (90–91), and other topics. One such topic is the cleft sentence, where P notes the Latin American tendency to use que as the relativizer (fue este libro que escribí en 1994 ‘it was this book which I wrote in 1994’).

Ch. 5, ‘Themes in form and meaning: The “genius” of Spanish’ (95–128), explicates a Sapirian theme: ‘All languages evince a curious instinct for the development of one or more particular grammatical processes at the expense of others’ (95). One such instance is the use of the personal-a construction, which accounts for the difference between querer ‘to want’ and querer a ‘to love’ (101).

Ch. 6, ‘Regional and social variation’ (129–67), contains excellent examples of Spanish isoglosses in Spain as well as Latin America. One representative of the former is initial /h/ and [θ] or [s] in Andalusia (139), the second of which ([θ] or [s]) is paralleled by [s] throughout Latin America (156). P mentions George Bernard Shaw’s depiction of Henry Higgins, about whom he remarks (131, n. 1): ‘Henry Higgins is generally thought to have been modeled on Henry Sweet’. This has proven to be erroneous, since Higgins was actually modeled after Daniel Jones. For details, see my review of The real Professor Higgins (Beverly Collins and Inger Mees, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1999) in Word (52.2.290–92, 2001).

Ch. 7, ‘Register’ (168–94), examines register variation in spoken Spanish. The use of fillers, such as mira ‘look’ (79), is certainly part of register and figures prominently in the comedy routines of, say, George Lopez, a Chicano standup comic whose proficiency on stage in codeswitching is truly amazing. Ch. 8, ‘Style’ (195–218), offers examples of rhetorical terms, such as paranomasia, synecdoche, synaesthesia, metonymy, and oxymoron.

Ch. 9, ‘Spanish or not?’ (219–58), discusses Judeo-Spanish (220–29), the Isleño dialect of Louisiana (229–31), Spanish creoles (233–51), and code-switching (CS), which includes Spanglish and Portuguese-Spanish CS in Uruguay (251–57). Ch. 10, ‘Towards the future’ (259–75), predicts that Spanish, now the number two language in terms of speakers after Mandarin, will be number four in 2050 with 475,000,000—right after Hindi (520,000,000) and English (480,000,000) (263). It is not surprising to learn that...