Working With A New Reference Grammar Of Modern Spanish
I picked up a copy of this book after my old reference grammars started showing their age. The standard RAE dictionary and the classic Bello grammar have their places, but they were written for a different era of Spanish pedagogy. This volume tries to cover the living language as it's actually used across the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America, which is both its strength and its main source of frustration. The book is organized thematically rather than purely by grammatical category. You'll find chapters on verb aspect, clitic pronoun ordering, regional syntactic variation, and pragmatic markers. The verb section alone runs about two hundred pages and covers subjonctivo usage patterns that most learners never encounter in classroom materials. I spent roughly three hours working through the clitic doubling entries because the examples don't always map cleanly onto the rules they're supposed to illustrate. Here is one specific problem I ran into last month. I was trying to determine whether a particular construction involving leísmo in Rioplatense Spanish was formally treated or just footnoted away. The index entry for "leísmo" pointed to pages 142 through 149, but the actual discussion of whether leísmo in those varieties should be classified as hypercorrection or as a legitimate regional variant appears on page 317 in a section titled "Pronominal Systems and Dialectal Variation." The cross-referencing is incomplete. I ended up flipping through the entire pronoun chapter until I found it by reading rather than by looking it up. That costs time you don't have when you're editing or translating under a deadline.
The content itself is solid though. The treatment of the future subjunctive is thorough without being pedantic. Most reference books either dismiss it entirely as archaic or spend too many pages on it. This one gives you the distribution facts, shows where it still appears in legal and religious registers, and then moves on. The discussion of the periphrastic perfect with haber is more nuanced than what you get in most textbooks. It correctly notes that the distinction between pretérito perfecto compuesto and pretérito indefinido isn't purely temporal in most dialects, which means your average learner who thinks "he comido" always means "I have eaten" is operating on a simplified model. One counter-intuitive point that took me a while to absorb from this book: the placement of unstressed clitic pronouns in European Spanish isn't purely syntactic. It's heavily influenced by prosody and the presence of pre-verbal particles like no or nunca. I had assumed the rules were mechanical. They're not. You can place a clitic before a negative particle and still have the whole unit function as a single prosodic phrase in rapid speech. The book doesn't hammer this point home enough, so you might miss it on a first read-through. Another thing most beginners get wrong about this grammar is how it handles regional variation. It doesn't separate Peninsular and Latin American Spanish into different chapters. It treats them as overlapping systems with different frequency distributions for the same structures. That approach is more accurate but it makes the book harder to use as a quick lookup tool. If you need to know whether a particular form is acceptable in Mexican Spanish specifically, you have to search for the relevant examples scattered throughout the chapter rather than flipping to a dedicated section.
The downloadable supplement that accompanies the print edition covers corpus data from the CORDE and the CREA databases. It's useful if you're doing research or need frequency evidence for a translation decision. The data is presented in tables that are sometimes dense and occasionally outdated since the corpus projects haven't been updated as frequently as this book's publication cycle suggests. I flagged about six entries where the example sentences looked like they came from texts predating 2010, which matters when you're discussing colloquial usage patterns. I wouldn't recommend this as a primary grammar for someone who has never studied Spanish at an intermediate level or above. The assumptions about prior knowledge are fairly high. A learner who only knows present tense indicative and basic past tenses will get lost in the aspectual distinction chapters within the first thirty pages. But for advanced students, teachers, and translators who need a reliable desk reference, it holds up well. The one area where it falls short is coverage of spoken discourse markers and interjections, which gets maybe two pages total. For that you'd be better served by the Corpus del Español Español or specialized sociolinguistic literature. If you're working with a physical copy, the binding is decent but the paper is thin enough that you can see through pages when you flip quickly. That sounds minor until you're trying to read two columns of grammar tables at once and the text from the opposite side bleeds through. The digital version avoids that problem entirely but the formatting of the linguistic examples sometimes breaks in older PDF readers. I've had good luck with the latest version on Chrome and Firefox.
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