Luis Cortés Hernández,Los estudios del español hablado entre 1950 y 1999: Períodos, disciplinas y corrientes. Madrid: Arcos/Libros, 2002. 470 pp. + CD-ROM.

Extract

This book reviews studies that have utilized corpus analysis of oral Spanish, in order to introduce the field of oral discourse. The work focuses on social and contextual varieties, emphasizing an approach that tackles the analysis of linguistic blocks restricted to an interactional unit. The plan of action is explained in chap. 1. Chap. 2 deals with the 1950–1965 period (dialectology and stylistics); chap. 3 discusses the 1966–1979 period and focuses on quantitative studies (social dialectology, sociolinguistics, and developmental psycholinguistics); chap. 4 corresponds to 1980–1989 and deals with discourse analysis; and finally, chap. 5 treats the 1990–1999 period and examines the different types of oral discourse, genre, registers, social dialects, and textual models. The works collected for this study cover 4,241 bibliographical entries that are cross-referenced with the CD-ROM, which displays the bibliography as a Microsoft Word document. The types of analysis are (A) intraenunciativo, (B) enunciativo, and (C) superenunciativo. We believe that by A, the author refers to components of the sentence within the sentence or intrasentential; by B he may refer to discourse at the level of the utterance, which is the result of the speech act; and by C he may refer to the level of the discourse, which is made of turns.