Abbreviations ix
PART I What is Catalan? 1
Chapter 1 Catalan-speaking areas 3
Chapter 2 Catalan among the other Romance languages 5
Chapter 3 Catalan in the twenty-first century 7
Chapter 4 Main dialects 11
Chapter 5 Pronunciation and spelling 13
5.1 Vowels 13
5.2 Reading and pronouncing consonants 17
PART II Words, word groups, and word formation 19
Chapter 6 Word classes 21
6.1 Nouns 21
6.2 Adjectives 24
6.3 Articles 32
6.4 Personal (stressed) pronouns 37
6.5 Possessives and demonstratives 41
6.6 Quantifiers 46
Chapter 7 Verb phrases 58
7.1 Verbs 58
7.2 Adverbs 79
7.3 Unstressed pronouns 89
Chapter 8 Prepositions 106
8.1 Unstressed (atonic) prepositions 106
8.2 Simple and compound stressed (tonic) prepositions 108
Chapter 9 Derivation: Creating words from other words 114
9.1 Qualifying affixes 114
9.2 Category changing affixes 119
Chapter 10 Compounds 127
10.1 Verb + noun 127
10.2 Noun + noun 128
10.3 Noun (or pronoun) + verb 129
10.4 Noun + adjective / adjective + noun 129
PART III Clauses and sentences 131
Chapter 11 Word order 133
11.1 The basics 133
11.2 Word order in specific contexts 134
Chapter 12 Relating elements 138
12.1 Coordination 138
12.2 Subordinate clauses 142
PART IV Doing things and real language 157
Chapter 13 Intention 159
13.1 Affirmation 159
13.2 Negation 160
13.3 Questions 164
13.4 Exclamation 167
13.5 Giving orders 168
Chapter 14 Focusing 170
14.1 Passive 170
14.2 Impersonal sentences and pronominal passive 172
14.3 Cleft sentences 174
Chapter 15 Defining 176
15.1 The article 176
15.2 Copulative sentences: Linking subjects and predicates 176
Chapter 16 Comparing 182
16.1 Comparing single elements 182
16.2 Clauses 186
Chapter 17 Treatments 189
17.1 Degrees of politeness 189
17.2 Grammatical relations of polite pronouns 189
17.3 Honorifics 190
17.4 Titles before surnames 191
Chapter 18 Emphasizers 192
18.1 Emphasizing single elements 192
18.2 Emphasizing whole phrases 195
Chapter 19 Interjections and ideophones 196
Chapter 20 Frequent native-speaker mistakes (solecisms) 200
20.1 Morphology 200
20.2 Verb usage 204
20.3 Syntax 204
Appendix - Verb conjugation 209
Index 243
