Andrés Bello and his Gramática de la lengua castellana: three highlights for the history of the common language

Authors

  • Andrés Gallardo Universidad de Concepción

Abstract

Andrés Bello's Gramática de la lengua castellana (1840) is a classic in the Spanish grammatical tradition, which nonetheless exhibits a surprising modernity. Three aspects of this book are shown which testify to its present-day currency: one, the cultural approach to grammar, two, the notion of language as a system of signs, applied to the description of word classes, and three, the description of pronouns as a type of word within the framework of the internal structure of the language.

Keywords:

Andrés Bello, grammar, grammatical categories, pronoun