A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (HRG)

by JohnButt (Author), Carmen Benjamin (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2011

  $15.18

  For many years A NEW REFERENCE GRAMMAR OF MODERN SPANISH has been trusted by students and teachers as the standard English-language reference grammar of Spanish. Now updated to include the latest findings of the Royal Spanish Academy's official grammar book, 'La Nueva gramA!tica de la lengua espaA+-ola', making A NEW REFERENCE GRAMMAR OF MODERN SPANISH FIFTH EDITION even more relevant to students and teachers of Spanish. Key features of this fifth edition include: * a 'Guide to the Book', enabling you to make the most of this new edition * new vocabulary such as topical and technological terms, bringing you up-to-date with contemporary spoken Spanish * more Latin-American Spanish, ensuring world-wide coverage * aclearer guidance to recommended usage -advice on the Academy's latest spelling rules. Whether a student or a teacher of Spanish, you can be sure that this fifth edition of A NEW REFERENCE GRAMMAR OF MODERN SPANISH will provide you with a comprehensive, cohesive and clear guide to the forms and structures of Spanish as it is written and spoken today in Spain and Latin America.

• Used

  Paperback
  1989

  $3.25

• Used

  Hardcover
  1989

  $4.57

  (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.