Research on Spanish in the United States: Linguistic Issues and Challenges

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The papers that have been assembled for this book cover a wide range of topics relating to the use of Spanish in the U.S.A. They stem for the most part from the 17th National Conference on Spanish in the United States, held in Miami-Dade County in March, 1999. In addition to linguistic and sociolinguistic coverage, issues are explored relating to ideology and politics. Leaving aside John Lipski’s useful though rather stolid introductory survey of existing research, the book is divided into seven sections. The first of these ostensibly covers bilingualism and interpreting, although the focus is very much on the latter, with detailed discussions of practical issues such as bad practice in law courts and the pitfalls associated with false cognates. Following this there are three papers that have a generally historical orientation: Rebeca Acevedo traces the development of the Spanish verb paradigm in Californian Spanish, concluding that this is undergoing a process of simplification that parallels what occurred in vernacular Romance. Ysaura Bernal-Enriquez looks for the social and historical factors that conspired in the loss of Spanish in the Southwest. And Garlan Bills gives a largely cartographic presentation of Nahuatl lexical penetration in New Mexico. The next section, entitled Borrowings, has papers on morphological adaptations of Anglicisms in the Southwest, the nature of phrasal calques in Chicano Spanish (are they linguistic or cultural?), borrowings in Cuban-American speech, and strategies for adapting words that are borrowed into Spanish. Next there is a rather loose section that focuses on “discourse-oriented” issues, such as Narrative and Codeswitching, the latter of course being one of the sacred cows of research on bilingualism in the U.S.A. Following this there are six papers on sociolinguistics and pragmatics: language and self-definition among Dominicans in the U.S.A., language maintenance among Cuban Americans in Miami, attitudes towards Spanish, literacy, forms of address, and politeness strategies. The optimistically entitled Phonology, Morphology, and Syntax chapter is a little thin, but has a useful piece on the elimination from U.S.A. Spanish of the alveolar trill [r] (the remaining two papers in the section are on estar in MexicanAmerican Spanish and morphosyntax among university students in California). The final section deals with issues that pertain to ideology and politics: intraethnic attitudes among Hispanics in northern California, language politics about Spanish in Puerto Rico, demographic changes in Florida and their significance for educational policy, and bilingual education in the U.S.A. Like much writing on U.S.A. Spanish, this book suffers from being too compartmentalized, with no overall themes or general conclusions. This stems in part from the fact that the book consists basically in a set of conference proceedings. But there is a more fundamental 504