26.3075, Review: Lexicography; Morphology; Semantics; Syntax: del Barrio de la Rosa (2014)

Mon Jun 29 17:49:23 UTC 2015

LINGUIST List: Vol-26-3075. Mon Jun 29 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.3075, Review: Lexicography; Morphology; Semantics; Syntax: del Barrio de la Rosa (2014)

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Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2015 13:49:03
From: Boris Yelin [byelin at purdue.edu]
Subject: Ejercicios de lexicología del español

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-2428.html

AUTHOR: Florencio  del Barrio de la Rosa
TITLE: Ejercicios de lexicología del español
SERIES TITLE: LINCOM Coursebooks in Linguistics 22
PUBLISHER: Lincom GmbH
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Boris Yelin, Purdue University

Review's Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

The proposed audience of Ejercicios de lexicología del español is a beginner
Spanish linguistics course. Though not offering original research, the main
purpose is to make available a new way of learning and practicing lexicology.
This book has six sections. They are General Concepts, Morphology, Word
Formation, Grammatical Categories, Semantics and Lexicosemantic Relations.
Though distinct, the sections tend to overlap considerably. The General
Concepts section seeks to refute prescriptive ideas as well as introduce
concepts, such as competence and performance, which drive many of the
mechanisms of lexicology. The section also touches on sociolinguistic factors
that affect attitudes toward prescriptivism, as well as performance across
registers. Lastly, it further defines some general terms, most importantly
what certain concepts, such as lexicology, do not entail.  In the Morphology
section, beyond explaining the types of morphemes in Spanish and their
combinations, the author introduces morphological analysis; he uses the
analysis as a springboard to effectively describe word formation and why
analysis must take a specific order. The Word Formation section explores how
words change syntactic categories with affixes as well as looking at the types
of combinations. Also, there is a brief, welcome mention of how register and
sociolinguistic factors play into word formation. The section on Grammatical
Categories explains not only what they are but also what morphosyntactic
constraints they exhibit. The section on Semantics is a rich section that
dissects semantic function, semantic change, and the often confusing
distinction for beginning students between reference, sense, and extension.
The concluding section, Lexico-Semantic Relations, is probably the lightest
section, touching on homonyms, hyponyms/hypernyms, synonyms and antonyms,
which are arguably the most intuitive notions of the book for a beginner, but
still a valuable addition.

At the end of every section, there are annotated bibliographies of the
subsections. These are useful for immediate reference to research which
influenced the author’s arguments or which he refuted. The entire bibliography
is also provided at the end of the book. The sources cited are immediately
familiar to those in the field of Hispanic linguistics and include seminal
works (e.g. Bosque and Gutiérrez-Rexach, 2009). Additionally, the question
index is rather helpful because one can easily find related exercises that are
spread out among the chapters. However, since many of the questions cannot be
answered as an open question without a set of options, the utility of the
question index is limited.

EVALUATION

As opposed to other works on aspects of linguistics that only focus on
morphosyntax, phonology, or semantics, this book incorporates all three
elements in discussing lexicology. As a result of this incorporation, this
book is not for the beginning linguistics student, though the author makes the
primary claim that it is suitable as an introductory text on Spanish grammar.
His secondary claim (that it can be used as a supplementary text) is more
accurate. For instance, there are often explanations that use phonological
notation that would be unfamiliar to a student without any experience studying
phonology. Other syntactic and semantic phraseology, while introduced, are
glossed over in such a manner that it would be difficult for the reader to
retain the information without other prior or proceeding knowledge to act as
reinforcement. 

One immediate strength is in the presentation, where the author explains his
wish to make grammar more exciting than mere lecture notes as well as tackling
the “word” as a commonly misunderstood unit of speech. It is also made clear
that the author follows in the footsteps of Ignacio Bosque, a well-known
Spanish syntactician. The author also admits a potential margin of error by
claiming that the ‘right’ answers are often not the final answers, or rather
they may just be the most appropriate answers for a given context. He
acknowledges all challenges to analysis and picks one. This admission of his
standpoints and the debate inherent  in many aspects of linguistics opens the
door to discussion with students. 

As far as accessibility, students that read this book need a firm concept of
phonology, since some of the explanations for prefixation and suffixation
require that knowledge. Without phonological knowledge, and more specifically,
knowledge of articulatory phonetics, the explanation may not be remembered.
One a different note, one can appreciate the crosslinguistic references and
explanations for some of the questions, e.g. mentioning that some languages
have definiteness attached as a morpheme. However, this textbook is supposed
to be targeted toward students of Spanish.  Some of these comparisons may be
difficult to grasp without more knowledge of languages. The book also seems
geared more toward native Spanish speakers since some of its exercises mention
words that are obsolete and are probably unknown to a nonnative speaker. One
quite positive and necessary aspect of the book is that before launching into
the material, there is an explanation of all abbreviations and marks, which
serves as an easy reference point while reading.

The novel format of this book, attempting to turn the concept of a workbook on
its head, at first seems intriguing, but quickly becomes inconvenient. The
questions are presented first with the answers in a following section with
explanations. Every question is accompanied by four potential answers. The
author conveniently places asterisks next to trickier problems, though the
ones that end up being tricky really depend on the reader. Immediately evident
is the fact that one cannot answer many of the questions without specifically
having studied the material, which comes with the answer. Furthermore, often
you have to answer two questions at once, which makes it annoying to go back
and forth because the first question actually builds on knowledge that the
second one tests. Furthermore, many of the questions involve knowing terms
that have not been explained in a previous solution. Though one of the goals
of this exercise book is to make students think about ideas, a straight
question that asks you to match the definition to any one of four terms you
may not know does not stimulate thought, but confusion.

Thus, some of the questions become a guessing game with the solution at the
end often admitting that a question was purposefully tricky. Perhaps because
of an attempt to make the possible answer sets more varied, a few of the
answers make very little sense. Simplicity would have been better. For
instance, in 5.3.164:
¿Cuál de los conceptos estudiados previamente determinan la referencia?
[Which of the previously studied concepts determine reference?] 
a. El sentido [Sense] 
b. La denotación [Denotation]
c. Solo la opción b es la correcta [Only  option b is correct]
d. Tanto a como b son correctas [A and b are both correct]
It is simultaneously obvious and confusing that answers b and c have the same
outcome. 

Moreover, some questions have more than one possible answer, but one theory
puts one answer over the other. Without knowing the theoretical framework
before the question, these frustrating encounters could make the reader feel
as if the questions are trick questions. Finally, at least in a few of the
explanations, wrong answers are dismissed without explaining why they are
incorrect, as in the case of 3.1.63, where one possible answer is written off
as “inválida de ningún punto de vista” [invalid from any point of you],
without further explanation. 

Overall this book has much to give students in the form of a review text that
includes all conceivable aspects of word formation. i.e. phonological,
morphosyntactic, historical, and semantic. Though the format of the exercise
book may be problematic at times, the questions themselves, and the subjects
that they cover, are indispensable to a well-rounded linguistics student. This
textbook would be well-suited for a survey course with either a different
primary text or texts, or a heavy lecture component where this book could be
used to reinforce the material learned in class. 

REFERENCES

Bosque, Ignacio and Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach. 2009. Fundamentos de sintaxis
formal. Madrid: Akal.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Boris Yelin is currently a doctoral student in Applied Spanish Lingustics at
Purdue University. His main interests are SLA and Pedagogy with a focus on L3
acquisition. Past research has included looking at the intersection of
language variation and semantics with respect to mood. His current career
trajectory is teaching language for the government.

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