El buen uso del español (review)

Any publication by the venerable Real Academia Española, founded in 1713, merits attention by the scholarly community by virtue of the Academy’s longevity, the consistent quality of its reference works, and the long list of esteemed intellectuals and researchers associated with this organization throughout its storied history. El buen uso del españolcontinues this significant tradition. Moreover, it follows the normative and prescriptive values associated with its well-known motto “limpia, fija y da splendor.” It should also be noted that this book is a joint publication with the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, all twenty-one of which are named on the back cover. Included in this enumeration is the Asociación Norteamericana de la Lengua Española, founded in 1973 in the United States, and whose current Director and President, since 2008, is the renowned scholar Dr. Gerardo Piña-Rosales, Professor at the City University of New York (Lehman Graduate Center).

The user will find this volume to be a veritable cornucopia of valuable information on proper usage. Furthermore, it provides information that a student is unlikely to encounter in the typical undergraduate curriculum or even some specialized courses in Spanish grammar. In this sense, it is a Castilian vademecumthat will serve the user well as an essential grammatical reference. Because of its precise explanations and judicious exemplification of the various topics covered, this book is invaluable.

Its structuralist foundations are apparent in its presentation, i.e., discussion of phonemics, the lexicon, inflectional and derivational morphology, and syntax. At first glance, it might appear that a theoretical linguist would have little interest because it prescribes proper grammatical forms in Spanish instead of describing what people say with the goal of providing a predictive theory of spoken Spanish language use. Nevertheless, this reference book provides worthwhile commentary and annotations on inappropriate usage of the Spanish language, and these observations offer important insights on how people actually speak Spanish.

The core of this book consists of 231 sections or minichapters of two pages each, which present in a succinct and lucid format the essential regulations concerning proper usage in Spanish in terms of phonology, orthography, the lexicon, morphology, and syntax. Each segment features brief and comprehensible shaded titles that begin on the even-numbered pages and end on the following odd-numbered page. These presentations contain observations in plain text with specific usage recommendations and observations in shaded text that encapsulate a significant amount of grammatical information.

While essentially prescriptive in nature, there are sections that address language variation in Spanish illustrated by the following selected examples:

1. 1. Phonology: El seseo y el ceceo(section 12, pp. 24–25); Los fonemas /y/, /ll/ y las letras y, ll. El yeísmo(section 13, pp. 26–27)

2. 2. The lexicon and orthography (i.e., foreign words orthographically adapted to Spanish [Arabic, English, French, Italian, indigenous languages, which capture sociohistorical dimensions of Spanish in contact with other languages via lexical borrowings, while providing insights into articulatory and auditory phonetics of target language and borrowing language through the corresponding Spanish adaptations]): Modificación de grafías en la adaptación de extranjerismos(I), (section 64, pp. 126–27); Modificación de grafías en la adaptación de extranjerismos(II), (section 65, pp. 128–29)

3. 3. Morphosyntax: Leísmo, laísmo y loísmo(section 132, pp. 260–61); El voseo(section 139, pp. 274–75; includes a commentary on the variable nature of this form based on context, gender, age, formality, and region)

4. 4. Syntax: El dequeísmo(addition of the preposition debefore a clause, in section 197, pp. 382–83); El queísmo(deletion of a preposition before a clause, in section 198, pp. 384–85); Impersonales conse y pasivas reflejas(the lack of verbal agreement of postposed noun phrase (e.g., “se alquila habitaciones”insection 229, pp. 444–45; other manifestations of impersonal constructions deemed...