LINGUIST List 7.1515

Sun Oct 27 1996

Qs: Statistics on neologisms, Spanish grammar

Editor for this issue: Susan Robinson <robinsonemunix.emich.edu>

Directory

1. "Melanie Misanchuk", statistics on neologisms
2. Trey Jones, Spanish Grammar Book

Dear linguists,

As part of my Masters thesis on anglicisms in the French press, I am
analysing the grammatical categories of borrowed English words in
French. The classic breakdown of grammatical categories for all the
French studies on anglicisms that I've encountered is 80-90% nouns,
5-10% adjectives and adverbs, 10-15% verbs, and 2-5% "other."

For a number of months, I have been looking for studies of other
languages which show similar grammatical breakdowns and, more
importantly, examples of breakdowns for plain old neologisms. I have
found nothing on this topic. If any of you know of articles/books
(not too detailed; I just want to compare the statistics of borrowings
to that of neologisms) in English, French, German, Spanish, Polish, or
Portugeuse (I don't speak all these languages, but I have lots of
friends!), I would much appreciate the references.

Thank you very much for your help.

Melanie

Melanie Misanchuk

Dept. of French Italian and Spanish
University of Calgary
Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Greetings Linguists!

Since linguists occasionally have to deal with real languages, I
thought I might be able to get some good advice here.

I'm looking for a good book on Spanish grammar, written entirely in
Spanish. I find it distracting to read *about* Spanish in English.

Given my druthers, I'd have it written in intermediate Spanish rather
than very advanced, be about Mexican or general Latin American Spanish
over Castillian, and in print, but I'll take what I can get.

For those familiar in general with Romance textbooks, my search is
inspired by the excellent French text _Grammaire Franc,aise_ by
Jacqueline Ollivier. Something like that for Spanish would be what I'm
after.

Respond directly to me, I'll summarize responses to the list.

 -Trey Jones
tjonesdataware.com

"Have pity on me. I use MSMail. Routed across a WAN. <shudder>"