A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish

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

• Used

  Paperback
  1989

  $4.24

• Used

  Paperback
  2004

  $7.99

  A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish is widely recognised as the standard English-language reference grammar of Spanish. It provides teachers and students of Spanish with a comprehensive, accessible and jargon-free guide to the forms and structures of the Spanish currently used in Spain and Latin America. This new edition has been carefully revised and updated, and its explanations have been checked against the findings of the Royal Spanish Academy's Gramatica descriptiva de la lengua espanola and other new works in the field. Many new Peninsular and Latin American examples have been included, the English text has been thoroughly revised and in many places expanded or clarified. A glossary of grammatical terms has also been included. As a result this new version of 'B & B' should now be invaluable to an even wider readership ranging from intermediate to advanced students of Spanish. A Workbook is available for use with A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish, 4th edition; Practising Spanish Grammar by Christopher J Pountain and Teresa de Carlos. ISBN 0340 66223 9

• 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.