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A definite article is an article that marks a definite noun phrase. Definite articles, such as the English the , are used to refer to a particular member of a group. It may be something that the speaker has already mentioned, or it may be otherwise something uniquely specified.
Spanish is a grammatically inflected language, which means that many words are modified ("marked") in small ways, usually at the end, according to their changing functions. Verbs are marked for tense , aspect , mood , person , and number (resulting in up to fifty conjugated forms per verb).
Singular nouns and plurals, for example, are treated as the same word, as are infinitives and verb conjugations. The table below includes the top 100 words from Davies' list of 5000. [7] [8] This list distinguishes between the definite articles lo and la and the pronouns lo and la; all are ranked individually.
There are many more words that can be used as determiners in Spanish. They mostly end in -o and have the usual four forms (-o, -a, -os, -as) to agree with the noun. ¡Otra cerveza, por favor! = "Another beer, please!" Mucha gente pasa por aquí = "Many people pass through here" No hay tanta gente como en verano = "There are not as many people ...
Because the definite article is, along with más or menos, the superlative marker, the comparative is grammatically indistinguishable from the superlative when it is used; an additional qualifier phrase such as de los dos ("of the two") must therefore be used to indicate that the adjective is the comparative.
Spanish uses the definite article with all geographical names when they appear with an adjective or modifying phrase, as in the following examples: la España medieval 'medieval Spain', el Puerto Rico prehispánico 'pre-Hispanic Puerto Rico', el Portugal de Salazar 'Portugal during Salazar's dictatorship', etc. Santiago es la capital de Chile.
These include the grammatical custom (inherited from Latin) of using a grammatically masculine plural for a group containing at least one male; the use of the masculine definite article for infinitives (e.g. el amar, not la amar); and the permissibility of using Spanish male pronouns for female referents but not vice versa (e.g. el que includes ...
Some loanwords enter Spanish in their plural forms but are reanalyzed as singular nouns (e.g., the Italian plurals el confeti 'confetti', el espagueti 'spaghetti', and el ravioli 'ravioli'). These words then follow the typical morphological rules of Spanish, essentially double marking the plural (e.g., los confetis, los espaguetis, and los ...