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Four Dichotomies in Spanish: Adjective Position, Adjectival Clauses, Ser/Estar, and Preterite/Imperfect by Luis H. González, and: Understanding and Teaching Reflexive Sentences in Spanish by Luis H. González (review)

2023; American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese; Volume: 106; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/hpn.2023.a900046

2153-6414

Education and Teacher Training

Reviewed by: Four Dichotomies in Spanish: Adjective Position, Adjectival Clauses, Ser/Estar, and Preterite/Imperfect by Luis H. González, and: Understanding and Teaching Reflexive Sentences in Spanish by Luis H. González Carlos Benavides González, Luis H. Four Dichotomies in Spanish: Adjective Position, Adjectival Clauses, Ser/Estar, and Preterite/Imperfect. Routledge, 2021. Pp. 124. ISBN 978-0-367-51728-1. González, Luis H. Understanding and Teaching Reflexive Sentences in Spanish. Routledge, 2022. Pp. 94. ISBN 978-1-032-10187-3 It is well-known that the teaching and learning of adjective position, adjectival clauses, ser/estar, and preterite/imperfect can be fraught with difficulties. To facilitate the teaching and understanding of these topics, Four Dichotomies in Spanish presents each one of them in the form of a dichotomy. The book shows how to reduce the multiple rules common in textbooks for each contrast to the single binary distinction of totality vs. part, or, put another way, the whole/part contrast. This distinction is easier to see in some of the dichotomies but is not present in all of them. Every chapter is example-driven, and many of the examples come from writing by students. In addition, there are examples from RAE (Real Academia Española), from scholars, from writers, from Corpes XXI (RAE), from the Centro Virtual Cervantes, and from the Internet. [End Page 333] Many of the examples are presented as sets of exercises that reinforce understanding of the content, and answers are provided. The book consists of four chapters, each taking up one of the book’s major topics. In the Introduction, the author presents an overview of the topics discussed, giving example sentences to illustrate how the dichotomies work. It is noted that “This book does not pretend to settle the discussion of the meaning of these four dichotomies,” but rather to “bring to the classroom scholars’ current understanding of those dichotomies.” Chapter 1, titled “Adjective position: Why having a ‘guapo novio’ does not raise any eyebrows, but having a ‘novio guapo’ might,” explains the relationship between adjective position and the notions of nonrestrictiveness, which expresses totality, and restrictiveness, which in turn expresses partitivity. In chapter 2, titled “Whole/part matters: Nonrestrictive and restrictive adjectival (relative) clauses,” the author argues that seeing nonrestrictiveness and restrictiveness under the lens of the part/whole dichotomy facilitates the selection of the appropriate relative pronoun in adjectival clauses. Chapter 3, with the title “Estar expresses change of state; most learners already have ser in their native language,” contrasts the functions of ser and estar, and suggests that the teaching of estar should be emphasized, given that ser can “take care of itself” due to the fact that it does not express change of state and is much more frequent than estar in learner input. Finally, in chapter 4, entitled “The preterite is like entering or leaving a room; the imperfect is like staying in it,” it is argued that the preterit/imperfect distinction is better explained through the dichotomy expressed in the chapter title than through the multiple rules presented in most textbooks, whose existence is questioned or criticized throughout the book. The assumption that rules should be reduced or simplified is a commendable aspect emphasized by the book. A related basis for the book is the notion that good grammar explanations should be unambiguous, succinct, and easy to remember, and the proposed solution, instantiated in a set of dichotomies, has the potential to allow students to better understand and use the four grammatical topics under study. However, this potential solution runs into problems due to the large number of exceptions, which are acknowledged by the author. For example, in chapter 3, it is stated that “At least a dozen ‘borderline’ cases could be addressed here,” one of them being that estar is used for location regardless of whether that location is temporary, and thus expresses a change of state (Los estudiantes están en la clase ‘The students are in the class’) or a permanent, steady state (El río Nilo está en Egipto ‘The Nile river is in Egypt’). That is, the dichotomy does not work. A dozen seems to be a significant number of exceptions...