Success and unsuccess of Spanish errors dictionaries and usage guides: Its potential relationship with Spanish as a Foreign Language

Abstract

There is a historical tradition of prescriptive language works in Spanish. The paper aims to evaluate common errors dictionaries and usage/errors guides to establish whether the guidance in language use they offer is appropriate. As a methodology, the distinction between real norm and ideal norm (Coseriu, 1992) is used, also employing principles of general linguistics. The results show that the language guidance offered by such works is not allways adequate. It is concluded that these common errors dictionaries and usage/errors guides still perpetuate conceptions of language that have been superseded. Much more serious is the fact that their actions not only delegitimize them but also waste the advances in linguistics that would allow for truly useful language guidance.