Palabras en lluvia minuciosa: Veinte visitas a la gramática del español inspiradas por Ángela Di Tullio ed. by Ignacio Bosque et al. (review)

Inspired by, and dedicated to, the lifetime work of Argentine linguist Ángela Di Tullio, Palabras en lluvia minuciosais an exceptional collection of twenty essays on specific aspects of Spanish morphology and syntax from different—albeit complimentary—theoretical perspectives. All authors featured in the book have worked with Di Tullio in different capacities, such as co-authoring papers and/or co-editing books, throughout her career.

The book's prologue and opening chapter are both devoted to showcasing and praising the influential work of Di Tullio, whose meticulousness and thoroughness embody the purpose of the book itself and the metaphor of its title. The second chapter, Virginia Bertolotti's "'El problema de vosotros': una curiosidad del español europeo fosilizada en América," provides a fresh viewpoint on the decline of vosotrosverb forms in Latin American Spanish during the 18th century and argues that this decline derived from the absence of a shared space with innovative and competing ustedesforms in plural addressing and from the lack of actual set boundaries in social proximity and distance among speakers at that time. Julio Borrego Nieto's " ¿Por qué se dejan barba los españoles?Relaciones entre aspecto léxico y cuantificación" and Sylvia Costa and Marisa Malcuori's "Acerca de las interpretaciones cuantificativas de mismo" review issues of quantification embedded in lexical items and phrases in Peninsular and Uruguayan Spanish, respectively, whereas the role and relevance of prepositions and prepositional phrases to syntactic theory receive detailed and thorough descriptions in the chapters by Ignacio Bosque ("Sintaxis sin concatenación: estructuras preposicionales con sustantivos duplicados"), Ana Bravo (" Paratemporal"), and Pascual José Masullo ("Predicación y atribución dentro de las frases preposicionales"). Different aspects of Spanish verb morphology, semantics, and history, on the other hand, are well exemplified and theoretically addressed in the essays by Brenda Laca ("Algunas observaciones sobre el subjuntivo y el parámetro de la concordancia temporal"), Rolf Kailuweit ("Verbos de sentimiento con experimentador de objeto en el español, lengua policéntrica"), Jesús Pena ("Alomorfia temática y sufijal en las formaciones deverbales sobre verbos irregulares de origen latino"), and Avel·lina Suñer ("Notas sobre los adjuntos de gerundio en castellano del siglo XIII: origen, estructura interna y cambio gramatical"). Despite differing in theoretical stands and approaches, these four papers form an expertly written and well researched set of essays that will surely be featured in any Spanish verb morphology reading list hereafter.

Other issues in syntactic theory addressed in the book are Olga Fernández-Soriano's chapter on split interrogatives ("Las interrogativas hendidas no concordantes y la extensión del foco"), Violeta Demonte's comprehensive paper on noun clauses ("Completivas definidas e indefinidas: los diagnósticos y sus límites"), and Mercedes Pujarte and Andrés Saab's essay on clitic doubling and A-movement ("Interacciones en el filo oracional medio: doblado de clíticos y movimiento-A"). The origins of the pervasive prescriptivism that characterizes many grammars of Spanish—those written by individual grammarians and those published by the Academias—, are brought forth in Adolfo Elizaincín's article "La polémica naturaleza normativa de las gramáticas." The volume's comprehensive nature is expanded with Gabriela Resnik's paper "Algo más sobre la posición del adjetivo: la gramaticalización de elativos posnominales," in which the author organizes and describes the gramaticalization process of post-noun adjectives, such as altoand zarpadoin Buenos Aires Spanish, and saladoand propioin Montevideo Spanish. The variation between gerund forms and adjectives as noun modifiers is the focus of Nicole Delbecque's essay " Hirviendo, ardiendoy colgandoen alternancia con hirviente, ardientey colgantecomo modificador nominal," while María José Rodríguez-Espiñeira's "Sustantivos con usos argumentativos testimoniales" explores the nature and argumentative...