"William E. Bull (1909-1972) y la ense anza del espa ol como lengua extranjera" ["William E. Bull (1909-1972): Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language"]

William Emerson Bull (1909-1972) was a Professor of Spanish Linguistics in a number of US universities. In his books and articles Bull researched such areas as the frequency of the Spanish “tenses,” the semantics of the adjective, the validity of the traditional verb paradigm, and the semantic contrasts between ser and estar. His other works include a set of 472 posters designed to illustrate Spanish semantic contrasts (Visual Grammar of Spanish, 1961); Time, Tense, and the Verb (1960), a study of the so-called “tenses” of the verb; and Spanish for Teachers: Applied Linguistics (1965), a teaching manual which is still cited in many recent studies. Bull’s pedagogical text Communicating in Spanish (1974) was innovative for both its carefully planned structure and the rigor of its ingenious language descriptions.Bull’s work is a reaction against the formal structuralism of descriptive linguistics, favoring a semantic approach in which the native speaker’s production reflects an organization of objective reality which the foreign learner does not share. Bull also introduced an innovative application of concepts from mathematics and physics to language analysis. At a time when many Structuralists still distrusted the possibility of basing linguistic description on the meaning of objective reality, this is exactly what Bull did, producing a body of work that was immediately applicable to teaching. Bull’s analyses constitute an attempt to provide English-speaking learners with a coherent description of the intuitions of the Spanish native speaker.