A New Reference Grammar of Spanish by John Butt, Carmen Benjamin, and: Practising Spanish Grammar: A Workbook by Christopher J. Pountain, Teresa deCarlos (review)

Abstract

MLRy 98.1, 2003 227 SilvinaPersino's definition ofthe 'poetica' ofthe volume's title: 'El termino"poetico" debe ser entendido aqui como una estrategia de lectura que privilegia ciertos aspectos cuya articulacion, aunque necesariamente provisoria, permite pensarlos como un conjunto' (p. 13). Ultimately, I am still not convinced that I know what this means. University of Durham Andrea Noble A New Reference Grammar of Spanish. By John Butt and Carmen Benjamin. 3rd edn. London: Arnold. 2000. xii + 572pp. ?18.99. ISBN 0-7340-71951-6. PractisingSpanish Grammar: A Workbook. By Christopher J.PouNTAiNand Teresa de Carlos. London: Arnold. 2000. xx +259 pp. ?J2.99. ISBN 0-340-66223-9. A third edition (B&B3) of John Butt and Carmen Benjamin's Spanish grammar, which has gained a dominant place in the teaching programme of every UK university de? partment of Spanish and many others elsewhere, is a welcome publishing event. New examples have been added, most significantly those that help to refinethe differences between European and American Spanish, and closer attention has been paid to register differences. Some chapters have been expanded, notably those on pronominal verbs (exploiting the results displayed more fully in A. Moreira Rodriguez and J.W. Butt, 'Se de matizacion and the Semantics of Spanish Pronominal Verbs, King's College London Hispanic Series, 2 (London: KCL, 1996)), and on tense-contrasts. The result is an enhanced version of what was already a very fine grammar. It has never been clear to me why this book carries the title it does. The term 'reference grammar' suggests a descriptive approach with near exhaustive treatment of all the main syntactical structures of the language. Such grammars exist (most notably Gramdtica descriptiva de la lengua espanola, ed. by Ignacio Bosque and Violeta Demonte, Real Academia Espanola: Coleccion Nebrija y Bello, 3 vols (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1999)), although none is written in English. B&B is not this kind of reference work, but an excellent teaching grammar, where the needs of the foreign learner of Spanish are uppermost in the minds of the authors, and are constantly referred to. Explicit linguistic theory is kept severely in the background, even when one might think it would help the learner. Thus, in the treatment of gender a brief dis? cussion ofthe underlying nature of gender, as a system of morphological agreements, would simplify the explanations needed. Similarly, in the chapter on mood, the stu? dent might be helped by a discussion ofthe essentially subjective nature of language and the way in which the speaker' s perception of the truthvalue ofwhat (s)he is saying broadly governs the selection of indicative or subjunctive. Again, the treatment of the difference between ese and aquel, like that between ahi and alli, would be aided by relating these contrasts to the distinction between the second and the third grammatical persons. Of course, the introduction of theoretical considerations into a book like this can only be justified if it leads to generalizations which are helpful to the learner (that is, ifit helps the learner to perceive part ofthe forest rather than studyingall the trees). I think the book could, on occasion, be improved by this kind of discussion. Being the work of European authors, the book's main perspective is that of Peninsular Spanish and British English. References to American Spanish are frequent but understandably vague (since the data that would allow greater precision are often lacking). However, one wonders how much the student is helped by the much-used comment that a particular structure is used in 'parts of Latin America', or that a given feature 'apparently' is used by American speakers of Spanish. Similarly, for this reviewer itwas disconcerting to shiftso frequently between an Anglocentric view ('How is English X rendered in Spanish?') and one focused on Spanish ('Spanish X is best rendered by Y in English'). Furthermore, comparisons with other modern 228 Reviews languages (most usually French, but also Italian, Portuguese, and German) are so sporadic as to lead one to ask why they are there at all. The grammatical judgements made by the authors are almost always extremely sound (a couple of reservations are noted above), and the clarity of the text is exemplary . I rarely found myself in...