A New Reference Grammar of modern Spanish 3rd Edition (Routledge Reference Grammars)

by Carmen Benjamin (Author), Carmen Benjamin (Author), John Butt (Author), John B. Butt (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2000

  $8.41

  'A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish' is widely recognised as the standard English-language reference grammar of Spanish. It provides teachers, students and other users of Spanish with a comprehensive, accessible and jargon-free guide to the forms and structures of the Spanish currently spoken and written in Spain and Latin America.
  
  
  
  This new edition has been updated throughout, with new material on points of particular interest to English-speaking learners. A host of new examples has been introduced, drawing on contemporary Spanish, and where possible contrasting Peninsular with Latin American usage. The most common levels of usage (formal, colloquial, familiar and popular) are distinguished, and special attention has been given to student needs, with extended explanations of difficult grammatical points.

• Used

  Paperback
  1989

  $4.24

• Used

  Hardcover
  1989

  $4.63

  (abridged and revised) This reference grammar offers intermediate and advanced students a reason- ably comprehensive guide to the morphology and syntax of educated speech and plain prose in Spain and Latin America at the end of the twentieth century. Spanish is the main, usually the sole official language of twenty-one countries,} and it is set fair to overtake English by the year 2000 in numbers 2 of native speakers. This vast geographical and political diversity ensures that Spanish is a good deal less unified than French, German or even English, the latter more or less internationally standardized according to either American or British norms. Until the 1960s, the criteria of internationally correct Spanish were dictated by the Real Academia Espanola, but the prestige of this institution has now sunk so low that its most solemn decrees are hardly taken seriously - witness the fate of the spelling reforms listed in the Nuevas normas de prosodia y ortograjia, which were supposed to come into force in all Spanish-speaking countries in 1959 and, nearly forty years later, are still selectively ignored by publishers and literate persons everywhere. The fact is that in Spanish 'correctness' is nowadays decided, as it is in all living languages, by the consensus of native speakers; but consensus about linguistic usage is obviously difficult to achieve between more than twenty independent, widely scattered and sometimes mutually hostile countries. Peninsular Spanish is itself in flux.