Reviewed by Barbara De Cock, University of Leuven, Belgium

A Festschrift for Paola Bentivoglio, professor of linguistics at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, this collection of papers pays tribute to Bentivoglio’s corpus research on linguistic variation. Written for the most part in Spanish, the papers are situated within the realm of Spanish linguistics, with special attention paid to Latin American varieties of Spanish.

The volume is divided into five sections. Section 1, ‘Fonética, fonología y entonación’, reflects Bentivoglio’s work on phonetics and phonology as well as her strong interest in oral corpora. Section 2, ‘Gramática’, is rather heterogeneous in its inclusion of not only examinations of variation in syntactic phenomena but also metareflections on linguistic research, such as the history of grammar writing.

The most extensive section is Section 3, ‘Léxico y semántica’, which contains papers that deal with a specialized lexicon and forms of address as well as cases of sociolinguistic, dialectological, and geographical variation. Additionally, Section 3 provides diachronic accounts of phenomena in Venezuelan Spanish. Section 4, ‘Discurso y pragmática’, is short and contains studies on genre-specificity and genre-definition as well as papers on Latin American political discourse. Section 5, ‘Historia, sociedad, teoría y metodología’, is perhaps the most general section: it is devoted to methodological comments and suggestions, in particular, factors that influence linguistic variation and evolution.

Overall, the heterogeneity of these papers yields an interesting overview of a wide variety of topics in Spanish linguistics.