co; and Academias Colaboradores in Argentina and Uruguay (Diccionario de la Lengua Espa±ola, 1970).
When confronted with the vast diversity of English and Spanish spoken and written in the world, one becomes conscious of the fact that a cross-linguistic comparison would constitute a gigantic enterprise of more academic than utilitarian value. Add the variety of cultural contexts, and the enterprise turns out to be well-nigh impossible. "Even discrete bilingual speakers such as Spanish-speaking or Spanish-English-speaking children may have been reared in different linguistic cultures; thus, for example, the Mexican-American, the Central or South or Cuban-American, and the Puerto-Rican American--all speak somewhat different dialects of Spanish" (Adler, 1993, p. 125).
Finally, the concept of grammatical "correctness" has been called illusory. Lado (1957) stated that "We mean by grammatical structure the systematic formal devices used in a language to convey certain meanings and relationships" (p. 52). In this sense, grammar goes beyond "usage", because usages differ in their communication power.
I shall now pinpoint but a few examples of where English and Spanish syntaxes and morphologies differ significantly, as well as some of the problems bilinguals encounter in translation, exercises, vocabulary expansion, and idiomatic constructions.
In English there are three noun genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. In Spanish all nouns are either masculine or feminine, there being no neuter (Friar & Kelly, undated). Generally, nouns ending in o are masculine, those ending in a are feminine. The difficulty for English speakers is to identify the many exceptions and the gender of nouns not ending in o or a. For example: la mano (the article being feminine, the noun ending in masculine o); el mapa (the article indicating a masculine noun, the noun ending in feminine a); el papel, la edad, el pie, la ciudad, el lßpiz. Thus, the deter...