Spanish grammar
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Spanish (Castellano) is a language originating in North-Central Spain which is spoken throughout Spain, most countries in the Americas, the Philippines and Equatorial Guinea.
It is an inflected language, with a two-gender system and about fifty conjugated forms per verb, but without noun declension and simplified pronominal declension.
Spanish was the first European language to have a grammar, published in 1492 by Antonio de Nebrija. This initiative was supported by the Catholic Kings as an "instrument of the Empire" (hence the political sensitivity of using the word "Español" in modern, regionalist Spain).
The Real Academia Española traditionally dictated the rules of the Spanish language, but since the 1960s its prestige has declined. Among the educated, the RAE's decisions are viewed as suggestions; among the uneducated, they are largely unknown. This article first describes the most formal and standard rules of modern Spanish, and then goes on to detail idioms and colloquialisms.
Formal differences between Peninsular and American Spanish are remarkably few, and someone who has learned the dialect of one area will have no difficulties using reasonably formal speech in the other. However, pronunciation does vary, and idiomatic usage can cause amusing difficulties. In particular, many verbs common in the Peninsula need to be avoided in America. In Spain, for instance, "Coger" simply means "Catch", whereas in South America it has an explicit sexual meaning.
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[edit] Verbs
Main articles: Spanish verbs, Spanish conjugation and Spanish irregular verbs.
At first, verbs are one of the trickier areas of Spanish for foreigners. There are three main conjugations, and over fifty conjugated forms per verb. However, the three conjugations are similar, and there are relatively few irregular verbs (and only a very small number of verbs which are wildly irregular).
[edit] Nouns
Main article: Spanish nouns
Spanish has nouns that express concrete objects, groups and classes of objects, qualities, feelings and other abstractions. As in English, all nouns are either countable or uncountable (not to imply that the distinction is always clear-cut) and, unlike English, also have a conventional grammatical gender (masculine or feminine). The gender is sometimes obvious (chica En. 'girl' is feminine) while others seem strange (mesa En. 'table' is feminine). Countable nouns inflect for number (singular and plural). See the main article for further information.
[edit] Adjectives
Main article: Spanish adjectives
Generally speaking, Spanish uses adjectives in a similar way to English and most other Indo-European languages. However, there are three key differences between English and Spanish adjectives
- In Spanish, adjectives usually go AFTER the noun they modify. The exception is when the writer/speaker is being slightly emphatic, or even poetic, about a particular quality of an object (rather than the mundane use of using the quality to specifiy which particular object they are referring to).
- "Mi casa roja" could either mean that there are lots of red houses in the world but I wish to talk about the one that I happen to own, or that I have many houses but am referring to the red one. "Mi casa roja" = My house, the red one.
- "Mi roja casa" means that I am stressing how red is the house of mine that I am referring to (probably the only house I have). "Mi roja casa" = My house, which is obviously red.
- In Spanish, adjectives agree with what they refer to in terms of both number (singular/plural) and gender (masculine/feminine). Eg mano (hand) is feminine, so "the red hand" is la mano roja.
- In Spanish, it is perfectly normal to let an adjective stand in for a noun or pronoun - with (where people are involved) no implication of condescencion or rudeness. eg "Los altos" means "the tall ones" or "The tall men". "El grande" means "The big one" or "the big man".
See the main article for further information.
[edit] Determiners
Main article: Spanish determiners
Spanish uses determiners in a similar way to English. The main difference is that they "agree" with what they refer to in terms of both number (singular/plural) and gender (masculine/feminine).
[edit] Articles
Definite ones: used instead of "the". Indefinite ones: used instead of a/an, some.
| ARTÍCULOS | Definidos | Indefinidos |
|---|---|---|
| Masculino | El, los | un, unos |
| Femenino | La, las | Una, unas |
mucho (mucha, muchos, muchas); poco (poca, pocos, pocas); otro (otra, otros, otras)...
[edit] Demonstratives
Spanish has three kinds of demonstrative, whose use depends on the distance beetwen the speaker and the described thing/person. The demonstrative equates to the English terms "this" and "that", although in Spanish the word used must agree for number and gender.
| DEMOSTRATIVOS | Corta (short) | Media (middle) | Larga (long) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Masculino singular | Este | Ese | Aquel |
| Masculino plural | Estos | Esos | Aquellos |
| Femenino singular | Esta | Esa | Aquella |
| Femenino plural | Estas | Esas | Aquellas |
[edit] Possessive
Those are quite difficult, because of the gender and number. The first one in the table goes before the noun, the second goes after it.
| POSESIVOS | 1ª persona singular | 2ª persona singular | 3ª persona singular | 1ª persona plural | 2ª persona plural | 3ª persona plural |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Masculino | Mi(s), mío(s) | Tu(s), tuyo(s) | Su(s), suyo(s) | Nuestro(s), nuestro(s) | Vuestro(s), vuestro(s) | Su(s), suyo(s) |
| Femenino | Mi(s), mía(s) | Tu(s), tuya(s) | Su(s), suya(s) | Nuestra(s), nuestra(s) | Vuestra(s), vuestra(s) | Su(s), suya(s) |
[edit] Other determiners
Indefinite quantity: poco (little), mucho (a lot), bastante (rather)...
Cardinals: un (one/a, an), dos (two), tres (three)...
Ordinals: primero (first), segundo (second), tercero (third)...
Interrogative (¿): qué (what), cuándo (when), cómo (how), quién (who), dónde (where), por qué (why), cuál (which).
The cardinal numbers greater than un and the interrogatives (except cuál) are indeclinable. The indefinite quantifiers, ordinals, un, and cuál are declined as adjectives.
See the main article for further details.
[edit] Pronouns
Main article: Spanish pronouns
Spanish has a range of pronouns that in some ways work quite differently from English ones. They include: yo, tú, vos, usted, él, ella, ello, nosotros, vosotros, ustedes, ellos, ellas, esto, eso, aquello etc.
See the main article for further details.
[edit] Prepositions
Main article: Spanish prepositions
Spanish has a relatively large number of prepositions, and does not use postpositions. The following list is traditionally recited:
A, ante, bajo, cabe, con, contra, de, desde, durante, en, entre, hacia, hasta, mediante, para, por, pro, según, sin, so, sobre, tras.
Lately, two new prepositions have been added: "durante" and "mediante", usually placed at the end.
This list includes two archaic prepositions (so and cabe), but leaves out two new Latinisms (vía and pro) as well as a large number of very important compound prepositions.
Prepositions in Spanish do not (as they do in English) convert a verb into a completely different one. Therefore to translate "run out of water" "run up a bill" "run down a pedestrian" "run in a thief" into Spanish requires competely different verbs, NOT simply the use of "correr" ("run") plus the corresponding Spanish prepositions.
See the main article for further information.
[edit] Miscellaneous
[edit] Cleft sentences
A cleft sentence is one formed with the copular verb (generally with a dummy pronoun like "it" as its subject), plus a word that "cleaves" the sentence, plus a subordinate clause. They are often used to put emphasis on a part of the sentence. Here are some examples of English sentences and their cleft versions:
- "I did it." → "It was me/I who/that did it."
- "You'll stop smoking through willpower." → "It's through willpower that you'll stop smoking."
Spanish does not usually employ such a structure in simple sentences. The translations of sentences like these can be readily analyzed as being normal sentences containing relative pronouns. Spanish is capable of expressing such concepts without a special cleft structure thanks to its flexible word order.
For example, if we translate a cleft sentence such as "It was John who lost the keys", we get Fue Juan el que perdió las llaves. Whereas the English sentence uses a special structure, the Spanish one does not. The verb fue has no dummy subject, and the pronoun el que is not a cleaver but a nominalising relative pronoun meaning "the [male] one that". Provided we respect the parings of "el que" and "las llaves", we can play with the word order of the Spanish sentence without affecting its structure - although each pemutation would, to a native speaker, give a subtly different shading of emphasis.
For example, we can say Juan fue el que perdió las llaves ("Juan was the one who lost the keys") or El que perdió las llaves fue Juan ("The one who lost the keys was Juan"). As can be seen from the translations, if this word order is chosen, English stops using the cleft structure (there is no more dummy "it" and a nominalising relative is used instead of the cleaving word) whilst in Spanish no words have changed.
Here are some examples of such sentences:
- Fue Juan el que perdió las llaves. = "It was John who lost the keys."
- Son sólo tres días los que te quedan. = "It is only three days that you have left."
- Seré yo quien se lo diga. = "It will be I/me who tells him."
- Son pocos los que vienen y se quedan. = lit. "It's not many who come and stay"
Note that it is ungrammatical to try to use just que to cleave such sentences as in English, but using quien in singular or quienes in plural is grammatical.
- *Fue Juan que perdió las llaves. (incorrect)
- *Fue Juan quien perdió las llaves. (correct)
When prepositions come into play, things become complicated. Structures unambiguously identifiable as cleft sentences are used. The verb ser introduces the stressed element and then there is a nominaliser. Both of these are preceded by the relevant preposition. For example:
- Fue a mí a quien le dio permiso. = "It was me that he gave permission to", lit. "It was to me to whom he gave permission.")
- Es para nosotros para quienes se hizo esto. = "It's us that this was made for", lit. "It's for us for whom this was made"
- Es por eso por lo que lo hice. = "That's why I did it", more literally: "It's because of that that I did it", or completely literally: "It's because of that because of which I did it."
- Es así como se debe hacer = "It's this way that it must be done", lit. "It's this way how it must be done" (como replaces longer expressions such as la forma en que)
This structure is quite wordy, and is therefore often avoided by not using a cleft sentence at all. Emphasis is conveyed just by word order and stressing with the voice (indicated here within bolding):
- Me dio permiso a mí. = "He gave permission to me"
- Se hizo esto para nosotros. = "This was done for us"
- Por eso lo hice. = "I did it because of that"
- Se debe hacer así = "It must be done this way"
In casual speech, the complex cleaving pronoun is often reduced to que, just as it is reduced to "that" in English. Foreign learners are advised to avoid this.
- Es para nosotros que se hizo esto.
- Es por eso que lo hice.
- Fue a mí que le dio permiso. (preferred: a quien)
- Es así que se debe hacer (preferred: como)
In the singular, the subordinate clause can agree with either the relative pronoun or with the subject of the main sentence, though the latter is seldom used. However, in the plural, only agreement with the subject of the main sentence is acceptable. Therefore:
- Singular
- Yo fui el que me lo bebí = "I was the one who drank it" (agreement with subject of main sentence)
- Yo fui el que se lo bebió (preferred form with same meaning, agreement with el que)
- La que lo sé soy yo = "I'm the one who knows" (agreement with subject of main sentence)
- La que lo sabe soy yo = (preferred form with same meaning, agreement with la que)
- Plural
- Somos los únicos que no tenemos ni un centavo para apostar = "We're the only ones who don't even have a cent to bet" (agreement with subject of main sentence) (from dialogue of Gabriel García Márquez novel)
- Vosotras sois las que lo sabéis = "You girls are the ones who know" (agreement with subject of main sentence)
[edit] External links
- English false friends and common mistakes
- Spanish Grammar Lessons
- Spanish Grammar Lessons
- Spanish Language Primer
- Spanish Grammar Lessons
[edit] References
- A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish — ISBN 0-340-58390-8
- Diccionario esencial Santillana de la lengua española — ISBN 84-294-3415-1
- Manual de dialectología hispánica — ISBN 84-344-8218-5
- Cassell's Contemporary Spanish — ISBN 0-02-595915-8
