Examining four dichotomies in Spanish, this book shows how to reduce the six to ten rules common in textbooks for each contrast to a single binary distinction. That distinction is a form of totality vs. part, easier to see in some of the dichotomies, but present in all of them.
Every chapter is example-driven, and many of those examples come from writing by students. Readers can test out for themselves the explanation at work in the examples provided. Then, those examples are explained step by step. In addition to examples from writing by college students, there are examples from RAE (Real Academia Espańola), from scholars, from writers, from Corpes XXI (RAE), from the Centro Virtual Cervantes, and from the Internet. Many of those examples are presented to the reader as exercises, and answers are provided.
This book was written for teachers of Spanish as a second language (L2) and for minors or majors of Spanish as an L2. It will also benefit teachers and learners of other L2s with some of these dichotomies.
1. Adjective position: why having a guapo novio does not raise any
eyebrows, but having a novio guapo might
2. Whole/part matters:
nonrestrictive and restrictive adjectival (relative) clauses
3. Estar
expresses a change of state; learners already have ser in their native
language
4. The preterite is like entering or leaving a room; the imperfect
is like staying in it
Luis H. Gonzįlez is Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at Wake Forest University. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Davis. His main areas of research are semantic roles, case, reflexivization, clitic doubling, differential object marking, dichotomies in languages, Spanish linguistics, and second language learning. He is the co-author of one book and the author of three other books:
Gramįtica para la composición. 2016. 3rd ed. Washington: Georgetown University Press. A Spanish advanced grammar and writing textbook, now in its third edition. Co-authored with M. Stanley Whitley. Cómo entender y cómo enseńar por y para. 2020. London: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/9780367688295 Four Dichotomies in Spanish: Adjective Position, Adjectival Clauses, Ser/Estar, and Preterite/Imperfect. 2021. London: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/9780367517281 The Fundamentally Simple Logic of Language: Learning a Second Language with the Tools of the Native Speaker. 2021. London: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/9780367347819
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