Nicolau Dols lectures as Professor Titular de Universitat at the University of the Balearic Islands. He is also a full member of the Philological Section of Institut d’Estudis Catalans, the official academy for the Catalan language. Richard Mansell is Senior Lecturer in Translation at the University of Exeter. Richard Mansell

• Abbreviations ix PART I What is Catalan? 1Chapter 1 Catalan-speaking areas 3Chapter 2 Catalan among the other Romance languages 5Chapter 3 Catalan in the twenty-first century 7Chapter 4 Main dialects 11Chapter 5 Pronunciation and spelling 135.1 Vowels 135.2 Reading and pronouncing consonants 17PART II Words, word groups, and word formation 19Chapter 6 Word classes 216.1 Nouns 216.2 Adjectives 246.3 Articles 326.4 Personal (stressed) pronouns 376.5 Possessives and demonstratives 416.6 Quantifiers 46Chapter 7 Verb phrases 587.1 Verbs 587.2 Adverbs 797.3 Unstressed pronouns 89Chapter 8 Prepositions 1068.1 Unstressed (atonic) prepositions 1068.2 Simple and compound stressed (tonic) prepositions 108Chapter 9 Derivation: Creating words from other words 1149.1 Qualifying affixes 1149.2 Category changing affixes 119Chapter 10 Compounds 12710.1 Verb + noun 12710.2 Noun + noun 12810.3 Noun (or pronoun) + verb 12910.4 Noun + adjective / adjective + noun 129PART III Clauses and sentences 131Chapter 11 Word order 13311.1 The basics 13311.2 Word order in specific contexts 134Chapter 12 Relating elements 13812.1 Coordination 13812.2 Subordinate clauses 142PART IV Doing things and real language 157Chapter 13 Intention 15913.1 Affirmation 15913.2 Negation 16013.3 Questions 16413.4 Exclamation 16713.5 Giving orders 168Chapter 14 Focusing 17014.1 Passive 17014.2 Impersonal sentences and pronominal passive 17214.3 Cleft sentences 174Chapter 15 Defining 17615.1 The article 17615.2 Copulative sentences: Linking subjects and predicates 176Chapter 16 Comparing 18216.1 Comparing single elements 18216.2 Clauses 186Chapter 17 Treatments 18917.1 Degrees of politeness 18917.2 Grammatical relations of polite pronouns 18917.3 Honorifics 19017.4 Titles before surnames 191Chapter 18 Emphasizers 19218.1 Emphasizing single elements 19218.2 Emphasizing whole phrases 195Chapter 19 Interjections and ideophones 196Chapter 20 Frequent native-speaker mistakes (solecisms) 20020.1 Morphology 20020.2 Verb usage 20420.3 Syntax 204Appendix – Verb conjugation 209Index 243