This book provides a clear and comprehensive overview of sociolinguistics and the pragmatics of oral communication in Spanish. Drawing on the research of foremost scholars in the field, Carmen Silva-Corvalán covers central concerns of variational sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, language change, and language contact, with special reference to Spanish in the United States.

A thoroughly revised and expanded version of Silva-Corvalán’s 1989 study, Sociolingüística: teoría y análisis, the book includes rigorous quantitative and qualitative analyses, and it documents such ongoing issues as language change in monolingual and bilingual communities, the nature of phonetic and syntactic variation, and modes of data collection and analysis. New topics include pragmatics and discourse analysis, discourse markers, and sociolinguistics and education.

Written in Spanish, Sociolingüística y pragmática del español will be welcomed by students and sociolinguistic researchers, who will find in it the ideal overview of the social aspects of language as well as a wealth of empirical data on Spanish linguistics. Complete with exercises at the end of each chapter and a convenient subject index, the book is appropriate for advanced undergraduates and graduate students of Spanish throughout the world.

This thoroughly updated second edition provides a clear and comprehensive overview of sociolinguistics and the pragmatics of oral communication in Spanish. While maintaining the same structure as the first edition, it includes revised “Ejercicios de reflexión” and new comprehension checks at the end of each chapter, along with numerous bibliographic references throughout, enhancing its use as a classroom text. Among the significant revisions are new sections on corpus linguistics and on statistical modeling programs for studying linguistic variables, an expanded chapter on the study of linguistic attitudes with special attention to Spanish in the United States, greater attention to the relation of pragmatics to sociolinguistics, including coverage of verbal politeness and forms of address, and updated information on Spanglish and on the teaching of Spanish as a heritage language.

Sonido y sentido lifts the learning of Spanish pronunciation for American English-speaking students to a new level, with support of an accompanying CD. Written in Spanish by a native speaker who is a leading figure in the field of Spanish phonology, this introduction to Spanish phonetics and phonology will improve both the pronunciation and understanding of spoken Spanish by demonstrating the specific ways in which the sound pattern of Spanish differs from English. Notable in that it explains the "why" of pronunciation with specific information on how the sounds of Spanish are organized—it also highlights the most important differences among varieties within the Spanish-speaking world. Together, the book and CD emphasize the sounds and sound combinations that are most problematic for English speakers learning Spanish.

In addition to a clear theoretical analysis of Spanish phonology, Sonido y sentido introduces the fundamental concepts of language, Spanish language, and the teaching and learning of phonetics—Spanish phonetics in particular. Utilizing the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) throughout the text to make for more precise phonetic descriptions, Guitart also discusses the relation between both the physical and psychological aspects of pronunciation.

Sonido y sentido contains exercises, both transcription and pronunciation drills, and each chapter concludes with a section, "Para pensar," which tests comprehension of the concepts presented. Answers to the "Para pensar" exercises appear in a separate appendix. A glossary of technical terms, a subject index, and a basic bibliography of Spanish phonetics and phonology round out this fresh and rewarding contribution to learning the Spanish language.

There is growing interest in heritage language learners—individuals who have a personal or familial connection to a nonmajority language. Spanish learners represent the largest segment of this population in the United States.

In this comprehensive volume, experts offer an interdisciplinary overview of research on Spanish as a heritage language in the United States. They also address the central role of education within the field. Contributors offer a wealth of resources for teachers while proposing future directions for scholarship.

Mapping old trails has a romantic allure at least as great as the difficulty involved in doing it. In this book, William Foster produces the first highly accurate maps of the eleven Spanish expeditions from northeastern Mexico into what is now East Texas during the years 1689 to 1768.

Foster draws upon the detailed diaries that each expedition kept of its route, cross-checking the journals among themselves and against previously unused eighteenth-century Spanish maps, modern detailed topographic maps, aerial photographs, and on-site inspections. From these sources emerges a clear picture of where the Spanish explorers actually passed through Texas.

This information, which corrects many previous misinterpretations, will be widely valuable. Old names of rivers and landforms will be of interest to geographers. Anthropologists and archaeologists will find new information on encounters with some 139 named Indian tribes. Botanists and zoologists will see changes in the distribution of flora and fauna with increasing European habitation, and climatologists will learn more about the "Little Ice Age" along the Rio Grande.

This collection is the first to examine the effects of bilingualism and multilingualism on the development of dialectal varieties of Spanish in Africa, America, Asia and Europe. Nineteen essays investigate a variety of complex situations of contact between Spanish and typologically different languages, including Basque, Bantu languages, English, and Quechua. The overall picture that evolves clearly indicates that although influence from the contact languages may lead to different dialects, the core grammar of Spanish remains intact.

Silva-Corvalán's volume makes an important contribution both to sociolinguistics in general, and to Spanish linguistics in particular. The contributors address theoretical and empirical issues that advance our knowledge of what is a possible linguistic change, how languages change, and how changes spread in society in situations of intensive bilingualism and language contact, a situation that appears to be the norm rather than the exception in the world.

This encyclopedic text focuses on the nature of Hispanic dialects, the spread of Spanish, and contemporary Spanish dialects in the Americas.

Fifteen research linguists discuss the varieties of Spanish spoken in California, Iowa, Indiana, Louisiana, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and Texas. They variously address language maintenance, syntactic variation, lexicography, language use and language teaching, and include studies on socioeconomic, political, and cultural aspects of language in the Spanish-speaking communities in the United States.

Using mnemonics is an age-old technique for remembering names, numbers, and many other things. In Spanish Memory Book, William Harrison and Dorothy Welker offer original mnemonic rimes that are by turns amusing, ironic, pathetic, sentimental, and sardonic to help students and independent learners acquire and remember Spanish vocabulary.

Included are mnemonic jingles for 700 of the 2,000 most commonly used Spanish words. Each jingle contains both the sound of the Spanish word and its English meaning. The authors have included a general pronunciation guide to Spanish vowels and consonants.

This innovative approach, which the authors have used successfully with their own students, is simple, effective, and entertaining. In the words of one student, "This book teaches me not only Spanish words but English words as well."

Mnemonics is an age-old technique for remembering names, numbers, and many other things. In Spanish Memory Book, Junior Edition, William Harrison and Dorothy Welker offer onginal mnemonic rimes appropriate in subject matter and skill level for junior high and high school students to help them acquire and remember Spanish vocabulary.

Included are mnemonic jingles for several hundred of the 2,000 most commonly used Spanish words. Each jingle contains both the sound of the Spanish word and its English meaning. The authors have also included a general pronunciation guide to Spanish vowels and consonants.

This innovative approach, which the authors have used successfully with their own students, is simple, effective, and entertaining. In the words of one student, "This book teaches me not only Spanish words but English words as well."

Spanish Phonology offers a comprehensive analysis of a variety of crucial issues in the phonology and morphophonology of various dialects of Spanish including syllable types, syllabification algorithms, syllable repair mechanisms, syllable mergers, nasal assimilation, obstruent vocalization and spirantization, obstruent neutralization, diphthongs and hiatuses, glide formation, onset strengthening, aspiration, rhotics, velarization, plural formation, word classes, and diminutives.

Written from the perspective of optimality theory and with syllabic structure at its core, this volume highlights recent advances in Spanish phonology.

The book includes margin notes to highlight key points and a glossary of constraints. Each chapter includes study questions, lists of the most influential sources for each chapter, and topics for further research. Spanish Phonology is intended as core reading for advanced phonology courses in Spanish linguistics, general linguistics, and related areas such as bilingualism, language variation, language acquisition, and speech and hearing.

Spanish Phonology and Morphology serves as an introduction to both the formal study of Spanish phonology and the framework of generative phonology.

Spanish Second Language Acquisition provides a panoramic overview of previous studies on the acquisition of Spanish as a second or foreign language, the theoretical approaches used in these studies, and the effects of various pedagogical approaches on the development of Spanish interlanguage systems. Barbara Lafford and Rafael Salaberry have compiled the first volume to provide a comprehensive critical overview of the research done and data compiled on how adults acquire Spanish as a second language. Major scholars in the field of SLA have contributed chapters having to do with a wide range of "products" (phonology, tense/aspect, subjunctive, clitics, lexicon, discourse/pragmatics) and "processes" (generative, cognitive and sociocultural theories) involved in the acquisition process-concluding with a discussion of the effects of instruction on Spanish interlanguage development.

While being an invaluable reference tool for undergraduate and graduate programs that focus on the acquisition of Spanish as a second language, due to the extraordinary range of the review research on theoretical and methodological issues, this is also an extremely useful volume for second language theoreticians and practitioners involved in all aspects of the pedagogy of other second languages. It is the editors' desire that students, teachers, program administrators and scholars alike will benefit from the insights that the contributors bring to the myriad issues that language professionals confront.

It's time for a new approach to learning Spanish verbs. Unlike popular verb guides that require the rote memorization of hundreds of verb forms, this book clearly explains the rules that govern the conjugation of all classes of Spanish verbs—especially the irregular ones that give second-language learners the most trouble. These simple, easy-to-understand rules for conjugating Spanish verbs are effective learning tools for both beginning students and more advanced speakers who want to perfect their usage of Spanish verb forms.

Spanish Verbs Made Simple(r) has many helpful features that you won't find in any other verb guide:

• Clear explanations of all verb tenses and forms.
• The simple rules that govern the conjugation of all verbs—including the 90% of irregular verbs whose irregularities are entirely predictable.
• A detailed discussion of how each verb form is used, with numerous examples.
• A full explanation of the distinction between ser and estar—the single most confusing element in the Spanish verbal system.
• An extended treatment of the subjunctive that will help you understand why it is used in some situations but not others.
• Conjugations for 35 model Spanish verbs and a comprehensive listing of 4,800 verbs that indicates which of the models each verb follows.

Going well beyond any other guide in the clarity and detail of its explanations—as well as the innovative manner in which individual verbs are linked to model conjugations—Spanish Verbs Made Simple(r) is the only guide to Spanish verbs a learner needs.

Unlike other vocabulary guides that require the rote memorization of literally thousands of words, this book starts from the premise that using the etymological connections between Spanish and English words—their common derivations from Latin, Greek, and other languages—is the most effective way to acquire and remember vocabulary. This approach is suitable for beginners as well as for advanced students. Teachers of the language will also find much material that can be used to help motivate their students to acquire, and retain, Spanish vocabulary.

Spanish Vocabulary is divided into four parts and four annexes:

• Part I provides background material on the origins of Spanish and begins the process of presenting Spanish vocabulary.
• Part II presents "classical" Spanish vocabulary—words whose form (in both Spanish and English) is nearly unchanged from Latin and Greek.
• Part III deals with "popular" Spanish vocabulary, which underwent significant changes in form (and often meaning) during the evolution from Latin to Spanish. A number of linguistic patterns are identified that will help learners recognize and remember new vocabulary.
• Part IV treats a wide range of themes, including words of Germanic and Arabic origin, numbers, time, food and animals, the family, the body, and politics.
• Annex A: Principal exceptions to the "Simplified Gender Rule"
• Annex B: 700 words whose relations, if any, to English words are not immediately obvious
• Annex C: -cer verbs and related words
• Annex D: 4,500 additional words, either individually or in groups, with English correspondences

An invaluable text in language and linguistics because it has a unique scope: a one-volume description of the Spanish language and its differences from English, and ranges from pronunciation and grammar to word meaning, language use, and social and dialectical variation. Designed for survey courses in Spanish linguistics with technical concepts explained in context for beginners in the field, Spanish/English Contrasts brings out the ways in which insights into the two languages have evolved as scholars have built on the work and research of others in the field. A bilingual glossary of linguistic terms is provided to facilitate discussion in either language.

This second edition is thoroughly updated to incorporate insights and issues that have come to the fore from the explosion of research in the past twenty-five years in all of the areas covered by the book. It includes an expanded bibliography and index, and adds new exercises for student application and class discussion. Its approach remains broadly based however, in order to accommodate a range of areas and data rather than focusing narrowly on one single theory or research area, and it continues to emphasize implications for language teaching, translation, and other practical applications.

The editors and fourteen other research linguists discuss—in English and in Spanish—the African influence on Caribbean phonology, dominant sociolinguistic attitudes in Puerto Rico, and historico-legal aspects of bilingualism in colonial Hispanic America.

Much recent scholarship has sought to identify the linguistic and social factors that favor the expression or omission of subject pronouns in Spanish. This volume brings together leading experts on the topic of language variation in Spanish to provide a panoramic view of research trends, develop probabilistic models of grammar, and investigate the impact of language contact on pronoun expression.

The book consists of three sections. The first studies the distributional patterns and conditioning forces on subject pronoun expression in four monolingual varieties—Dominican, Colombian, Mexican, and Peninsular—and makes cross-dialectal comparisons. In the second section, experts explore Spanish in contact with English, Maya, Catalan, and Portuguese to determine the extent to which each language influences this syntactic variable. The final section examines the acquisition of variable subject pronoun expression among monolingual and bilingual children as well as adult second language learners.

"[A] superb collection of studies that substantially increases our understanding, not only of variation in subject personal pronouns, but also of variable morphosyntactic processes generally.... clearly relevant to all students and scholars who wish to understand the complexities of linguistic variation and dialect contact." -- Robert Bayley, professor of linguistics, University of California, Davis

"Students and scholars will find that this volume is an essential reference in the field of Spanish language variation. If the study of final /s/ has led Spanish sociophonetics, the study of subject pronouns stars in sociogrammar. This volume presents a 3D analysis of how subject pronouns are used and acquired in Spanish. This comprehensive volume is not only of interest to those concerned with Spanish grammar, but also to anyone interested in pro-drop languages. The vision of Carvalho, Orozco and Shin has harmonized an excellent collective volume." -- Francisco Moreno-Fernández, professor of Hispanic linguistics. University of Alcala (Spain) and Instituto Cervantes at Harvard University.

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"If you seek innovative, theoretically and empirically driven research into syntactic variation, open this book and read on. Here a variationist focus on alternating sound and silence, something and nothing, or subject pronouns and nulls generates striking insights into the nature of Spanish and those who speak and learn it." -- Richard Cameron,, University of Illinois at Chicago