The writing of this second edition has benefited significantly from a number of reviews of the first edition. Particularly helpful were those by Adelino Álvarez Rodríguez (Analecta Malacitana, 17 (1994): 405–27), Robert J. Blake (Hispanic Review, 61 (1993): 547–50), Steven N. Dworkin (Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 38 (1993), 91–4), John England (Modern Language Review, 87 (1992): 770–1) and Alf Monjour (RLiR, 56 (1992): 250–9). Similarly profitable were the detailed personal letters I received from Jerry Craddock, John England, Fred Hodcroft and Ma Jesús López Bobo, and the various suggestions for improvement made by the Spanish translator of the first edition, Ignacio Pérez Pascual. To all these friends and colleagues I am immensely grateful for their positive comments, for the errors and omissions they drew my attention to, and for their broader suggestions for improvement. The large majority of the points they make have received attention in this second edition, and if I have not attended to every single one, they will understand that, on a few points, I still think I was right.

Two other factors have motivated a rewriting of many sections of the original book. On the one hand, Hispanic and Romance linguistics have, of course, moved on since the first edition was written, and evidence of new thinking on the problems tackled here will be found in the revised list of references.