The XVII Congress of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language (ASALE), which closes this afternoon in Quito (Ecuador), has been the scene of the presentation of the second revised and expanded edition of the New grammar of the Spanish language ( NGLE), one of the capital works of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) and ASALE.
The RAE academic and director of the work Ignacio Bosque has been in charge of presenting, together with the edition coordinator, Cristina Sánchez, the different novelties of this new edition of the NGLE.
The review has focused on four aspects. The first of them has been the improvement of the descriptions when there is more data on the contents addressed, whether related to the grammatical analysis of the phenomena or their geographical and social variation.
Likewise, attention has been paid to improving the didactic aspects of the writing, given that the work is aimed at a very broad set of recipients. The novelties have also focused on the addition to each chapter of a complementary bibliography so that readers can expand the contents presented with the degree of detail they desire and with the theoretical or applied orientation that best responds to their interests.
Finally, an expansion of the list of cited texts has been carried out with relevant works (almost all literary) that could not be cited in the previous version or that have been published in recent years.
The institution details that the present edition coincides with the previous one in not presenting itself as a treatise on dialectology, but as a grammar attentive to the phenomena of variation, but fundamentally focused on the description of phonetic, phonological, morphological and syntactic units. In fact, the text is conceived and written to pay particular attention to the relationship between forms, meanings and uses. A good number of details have also been added about the origin of some constructions, their use or their variants in various stages of ancient Spanish.
The work, whose new paper version (Espasa) will be available in the coming months, has pursued the search for a balance between tradition and novelty, between description and norm, between theory and exemplification, between analysis of abstract structures and exhibition of particular uses. .
PANHISPANIC DICTIONARY OF DOUBTS
On the other hand, the RAE has presented the second edition of the Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts (DPD). The director of the work and academic, Salvador Gutiérrez Ordóñez, has been in charge of explaining the new features that are incorporated into this new edition of a tool dedicated to resolving regulatory issues that affect grammar, spelling or the lexicon of Spanish. .
This second edition includes amendments and additions to almost one out of every two non-thematic articles present in the first edition. 370 new entries have been added, of which 362 are non-thematic articles, referring mostly to neologisms and foreign words incorporated into use in recent years, and eight are thematic articles, among which those dedicated to issues such as the gerund stand out, prefixes and prizes.
To the additions of new articles are also added modifications to existing entries. Some recommendations made in the first edition have been reconsidered on issues not yet settled at that time.
An example is the plural of recent loans ending in habitual consonants in final position in Spanish heritage words. In the first edition, the plural in -es was recommended for these voices: masters, chándales, pírsines, etc. This commitment to the plural in -es was based on the existence of precedents in other already established loans (revolvers, leaders, cocktails, rallies, etc.), which made it foreseeable that new loans of this type would adapt without difficulty to that same pattern.
However, in the years since the publication of the first edition of the DPD, this prediction has not been entirely confirmed and a marked tendency to the plural in -s is observed. Hence, in most cases both forms of plural are now recognized as valid in this type of loans (masters and masters, for example), opening the door to finally being the use of Spanish speakers that, over time, , determine which of the two forms ends up prevailing.
The new edition will be published in the coming months on paper (Taurus) and will soon be available on the RAE website.