"Essays on Spanish: Words and Grammar," by Dwight Bolinger

Essays on Spanish: Words and Grammar, by Dwight Bolinger, Professor Emeritus, Harvard and Stanford Universities. Edited by Joseph H. Silverman, UC Santa Cruz. With characteristic modesty Dwight Bolinger introduces this collection of his papers on Spanish as an "empirical study with a minimum of theoretical apparatus," but for those who have been reading and enjoying his work throughout these decades of turbulence in linguistic theory, there is more to it than that. To be sure, one quality that will impress readers of these pages is Bolinger's sharp eye for linguistic detail, the sheer accuracy of his observations and subtlety with which he grasps and interprets nuance. (from the Preface by John Ellis) Though what follows was written over a period of almost half a century, I have arranged the chapters not chronologically but in order of approximately increasing complexity, starting with problems of word usage, the easiest ones first, and continuing through word classes, word order, gove