Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Personal pronouns in Spanish have distinct forms according to whether they stand for a subject , a direct object , an indirect object , or a reflexive object. Several pronouns further have special forms used after prepositions. Spanish is a pro-drop language with respect to
Spanish is a pro-drop language with respect to subject pronouns, and, like many European languages, Spanish makes a T-V distinction in second person pronouns that has no equivalent in modern English. Object pronouns can be both clitic and non-clitic, with non-clitic forms carrying greater emphasis.
For example, if we translate a cleft sentence such as "It was Juan 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
Spanish is classified as a subject–verb–object language; however, as in most Romance languages, constituent order is highly variable and governed mainly by topicalization and focus. It is a " pro-drop ", or " null-subject " language—that is, it allows the deletion of subject pronouns when they are pragmatically unnecessary.
The grammars of some Western languages, however, require that a subject be stated (although this is often avoided by using a passive or impersonal construction). Most of the translators cited in Eliot Weinberger's 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei supply a subject. Weinberger points out, however, that when an "I" as a subject is inserted, a ...
Get AOL Mail for FREE! Manage your email like never before with travel, photo & document views. Personalize your inbox with themes & tabs. You've Got Mail!
As is typical of verbs in virtually all languages, Spanish verbs express an action or a state of being of a given subject, and like verbs in most Indo-European languages, Spanish verbs undergo inflection according to the following categories: Tense: past, present, or future; Number: singular or plural; Person: first, second or third
In the sentence The man sees the dog, the dog is the direct object of the verb "to see". In English, which has mostly lost grammatical cases, the definite article and noun – "the dog" – remain the same noun form without number agreement in the noun either as subject or object, though an artifact of it is in the verb and has number agreement, which changes to "sees".