Spanish in the Western Hemisphere in Contact with English, Portuguese, and the Amerindian Languages ed. by Eugenio Chang-Rodriguez (review)

Book Reviews237 Despite its shortcomings, Bergquist's book does have several strong points. After each phonological or morphological development from Latin to forms in the three languages in question, illustrative examples follow immediately, e.g., LATIN > Castilian, Portuguese, Catalan. The close proximity of the examples from the three languages makes it fairly easy to see the relationships that obtain among them rather than having to search through different sections of the comparative study in order to comprehend the similarities and differences among the forms (as in Entwistle, 1962). The various indices (by the Latin, Castilian, Portuguese, or Catalan word) in the latter part of Bergquist's book facilitate the use of this work as a reference tool. Moreover, the language of the book is clear and concise and very accessible to a beginning student of Ibero-Romance without a great deal of linguistic training. Overall, Bergquist's book fills a need in the field of Romance Linguistics for a parallel comparative approach to the systematic study of the three IberoRomance languages. BARBARA A. LAFFORD Arizona State University EUGENIO CHANG-RODRIGUEZ, guest editor. Spanish in the Western Hemisphere in Contact with English, Portuguese, and the Amerindian Languages. Special Issue of Word 33.1-2 (April-August 1982): 1-198. This volume contains fourteen contributions by twelve different linguists along with an "Introduction" by guest editor Chang-Rodriguez. Of the fourteen, five deal with various aspects of the Spanish language in this country: Theodore S. Beardsley, Jr., "Spanish in the United States" (15-28); Daniel N. Cárdenas, "Morphosyntactic Preferences in the Spanish of Southern California" (29-40); Ana Celia Zentella, "Spanish and English in Contact in the United States: The Puerto Rican Experience" (41-57); Jorge M. Guitart, "On the Use of the Spanish Subjunctive Among Spanish-English Bilinguals" (59-67); Rudolph C. Troike, "Problems of Language Planning for Spanish in the United States" (69-79). The remaining nine treat topics such as Spanish in Puerto Rico (Rose Nash, "Jobs, Gender, and Civil Rights: Puerto Rican Spanish Responds to the Law," 81-95), Panama (Elsie Alvarado de Ricord, "The Impact of English in Panama," 97-107), Mexico et alibi (D. Lincoln Canfield, "The Diachronie Factor in American Spanish in Contact," 109-1 18; Fritz G. Hensey, "Castellanización in Oaxaca: Language Instruction for Pre-School Children," 119-126); Peru twice (MJ. Hardman-de-Bautista, "The Mutual Influence of Spanish and the Andean Languages," 143-157; Eugenio Chang-Rodriguez, "Problems for Language Planning in Peru," 173191 ); Uruguay (Fritz G. Hensey, "Uruguayan fronterizo: A Linguistic Sampler, 193-198); and Hispanic America in general (Paul V. Cassano, "Language Influence Theory Exemplified by Quechua and Maya," 127-141; Juan Clemente Zamora, "Amerindian Loan Words in General and Local Varieties of American Spanish," 159-171). The Beardsley piece is useful for what it says about the history of early Spanish settlement (especially in what was to become the American southeast ), but frequently gives unreliable or out-of-date information when it turns its attention to strictly linguistic topics. Professor Cárdenas offers up a lively 238Rocky Mountain Review treatise on syntactic topics (especially the subjunctive), though his work is occasionally marred by suspect data and dubious conclusions. None of these criticisms apply to Ana Celia Zentella's analysis of the Puerto Rican experience. Zentella's work is an important, well researched, convincingly and felicitously written account of the realities of code-switching in a New York City Puerto Rican neighborhood (her chief point: "not every code switch can be assigned a specific communicative purpose because there is agood deal of switching for switching's sake . . . [I]t has become a badge of community membership," 54); she also offers wise, balanced commentary on the many pseudo-linguistic and partisan analyses of the language issue in Puerto Rico itself. Jorge Guitart's contribution is likewise valuable as a pilot study on subjunctive and indicative usage in clauses governed by el hecho de que under various conditions of expectedness. Rudolph Troike's "Language Planning" gives advice to bureaucrats burdened with the tricky task of translating documents into a Spanish that does not offend one regional group or another. Rose Nash's work on Spanish gender systems vs. United States...