Investigación de gramática

Lunn, Patricia, and Janet DeCesaris. Investigación de gramática. Boston: Heinle & Heinle. 1992. 218 pp.


This is neither a reference grammar of Spanish nor an inquiry into the nature of grammar itself. Instead, it is a discourse on some areas that tend to prove problematic for the English-speaking student of Spanish. The book consists of ten chapters of grammatical analyses and exercises, to which are appended seven short stories as foci and exemplars of the linguistic arguments expounded in the body of the text. There is in addition a useful Instructor's Manual of thirty eight pages. For some reason this is in English, even though the rest of the text is in Spanish and one presumes that the class discussions will be in Spanish.
Investigación de gramática is divided into ten chapters which follow a more or less uniform format. The first section in each chapter is titled Para Empezar. This often includes a translation exercise (Spanish to English) that dwells on the problems to be tackled in the chapter. There follows a section called Análisis. This is really the core of each chapter. It offers grammatical explications as well as exercises specific to the points being discussed. The exercises here could usually be handled either as written or oral. Towards the end of each chapter we have Más Práctica. In this part students are required to find and interview native speakers of Spanish in an attempt to elicit various speech patterns. The authors maintain that finding native speakers is rarely a problem if students spend enough time looking. While this might be true in large areas of the country, it is still quite untrue for even larger areas. Hence these exercises would have to be ignored or adapted when compliant native speakers of Spanish prove impossible to find. Finally, an attempt is made to apply the grammar in Lecturas, the seven short stories [77] included at the end of the text. Quite a few of the sample sentences used throughout the book to exemplify particular grammatical points are drawn from these readings. The concentration is on uses of the language in these short stories, rather than characterization or theme, but for many instructors the presence of these short stories could provide opportunities for introductory literary analysis. Among the seven readings are short stories by Baroja, Cortázar, and Rulfo. Not all the other selections are of outstanding intrinsic interest. Though one might hope that all students at this level would possess their own Spanish-English dictionary, it might have been useful to offer a more comprehensive gloss of the words used in the readings. The book does offer a glosario, but this is used for defining grammatical terms, not for the lexicon used in the readings. Regrettably, the book provides no index of topics treated.
Apart from the literary readings, each chapter uses sentences or whole paragraphs to exemplify particular points. These selections can be a little grating. For instance, is a long paragraph on the British royal family or fairy tales such as Little Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks appropriate for this kind of book? The Instructor's Manual, too, is marred from time to time by a slightly patronizing attitude to teachers of Spanish, e. g., as linguists we realize that not everyone who will be teaching from this book has the same training that we do. (Manual 2).
It is probably inevitable that some elements in extensive discussions of grammar such as contained in this or any book will provoke less than unanimous agreement among readers. Several formulations offered by Lunn and DeCesaris are at least highly debatable, if not erroneous. Does any native speaker of Spanish really construe the future tense as employed in a Spanish weather forecast to be the future of probability (13)? And it is untrue to say En el inglés moderno no existen desinencias subjuntivas (60). Of course there are. They are usually identical in form with the infinitive, but they are still subjunctives, e. g., the author's own example: We require that he appear in person. Or think of a doublet such as I insist that Patrick works here versus I think that Patrick work here. Rather than claiming that the English subjunctive is «formal or hasta anticuado» the authors might have done better to build on what remains of the subjunctive in English as a point of departure for their explanation of the Spanish subjunctive. There are other cases where at least one reader would differ from these authors. For instance, they follow the old analysis of deriving command forms (haga algo) from a putative underlying form such as (yo quiero que usted) haga algo. But if this is valid, how is it that affirmative familiar commands don't obey the paradigm? Yo quiero que tú cannot be followed by haz. The author's argument also ignores the evidence of the syntax: obviously inadmissible in Spanish is yo quiero que usted levántese temprano.
The authors see their book as oriented towards advanced students. However, quite a few of the topics dealt with do not appear too advanced. For instance, there are two pages on the formation of adverbs, not exactly a difficult matter in Spanish. And the exposition of hay seems unnecessarily long. For students of Spanish at this level, is it really necessary to point out (102) that usted and ustedes behave like third person pronouns? The level of discourse when treating other topics is sometimes less than advanced. The chapter on pronouns (5) might have pushed students a little further, being a good place for a consideration of «a/las» phrases such as arreglárselas». These common expressions are seldom introduced in our elementary and intermediate texts, and a student can go through an entire program in Spanish without ever coming across them. Here too might have fitted an extended treatment of gustar, a construction which even our best undergraduate students never appear to master. Later on (145) the account of neuter lo is lean for this level, as there is no mention of lo + adjective expressions.
There are many other cases where one feels that the book might have offered the advanced student a somewhat richer diet. For instance, in discussion of perfect tenses it would have been interesting to contrast tener expressions with haber expressions, especially since the paragraph the authors choose to exemplify the latter also contains a nice use of the former teníamos planeados (18). As for the subjunctive: the book does add somewhat to explanations which students will have previously encountered in beginning and intermediate textbooks. For instance, it ties together para que and antes de que. They both take the subjunctive, because «su significado establece una relación temporal entre las dos cláusulas según la cual la proposición subordinada es irreal durante el transcurso temporal de la proposición principal» (69). For advanced students the authors might have ventured into a discussion of more sophisticated or subtle uses of this mood, or following words like como or aunque, or in such as tú eres la [78] primera persona que me haya comprendido. Advanced students might have enjoyed a more sophisticated exposition of the preterite/imperfect distinction. Even those non-native speakers of Spanish who think they know all the rules are sometimes surprised by a native speaker's choice of aspect in the past tense. The authors offer an interesting but short exposition on journalistic uses of the preterite and imperfect, but a book at this level could have expanded on these non-paradigmatic uses. Few of the preterite/imperfect judgments they ask us to make are hard to call. Additional examples involving the past of the copula would have been useful, since choice of fue/era and estuvo/estaba can cause problems even for the most proficient non-natives. They might also have dwelt a little more on explaining doublets such as quise/ quería, or on contrasting the imperfect with the imperfect progressive.
Though in a number of cases one might have wished for a slightly more elevated level of discourse to challenge our brightest advanced students, a general verdict on Investigación de gramática must be positive. There are lots of good things in the book, and the authors illuminate many subtleties of Spanish that rarely receive comment. Take their treatment of the distinction between simple future and ir a future... Si quieres conocer a Marcos, lo invitaré a la fiesta (13). Also good is the discussion of choice of aspect in hubo salido or El difunto estuvo casado/ El difunto estaba casado (39). And it is an interesting insight to link verbs that always carry the reflexive pronoun, such as quejarse, atreverse, with a verb like suicidarse that is explicitly reflexive. The treatment of se is very comprehensive, though students at this level need to be alerted to the morphology of a phrase like se le vio. On ser and estar it would have been worthwhile to point out that often the best strategy is to avoid both, instead rendering «to be» by forms like quedarse, encontrarse, resultar. Por/para is also handled well, a nice distinction being established between acompañada por and acompañada de (177). The book's production quality is good, the only misprint noticed being matromonio (188). The Spanish-language and punctuation -in which the book is written would scarcely be typical of that of a similar book produced in Spain, but only one Anglicism stands out... las primeras tres frases ya se han hecho (72).
Lunn and DeCesaris believe that a detailed linguistic study of a language will yield long term benefits in both listening and speaking. In their view this book will help students not just in the acquisition of Spanish but also in the ability to think and make generalizations about language itself. To this end Investigación de gramática seems likely to be quite successful. One can differ with some of their formulations and disagree with choices and emphases the authors have made. However, this should not cloud the fact that Lunn and DeCesaris have produced a workman-like text that provides a welcome addition to our rather sparse shelf of advanced grammar textbooks.
David Barnwell