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Este es el libro que escribió mi amigo, but rarely Este es el libro que mi amigo escribió = "This is the book that my friend wrote" A sentence in which the direct object is the topic or "theme" (old information), while the subject is part of the comment, or "rheme" (new information), often assumes OVS order. In this case the direct object ...
The complexity of Spanish grammar is found primarily in verbs. Inflected forms of a Spanish verb contain a lexical root, a theme vowel, and inflection; for example, the verb cantar ("to sing") becomes cantamos [b] ("we sing") in its first-person plural, present indicative form. [10]
Generally, nouns ending in -á, -é, and -ó add -s to form the plural, [43] while nouns ending in -í and -ú can admit both variants (-s and -es) to form the plural. [44] For example, el café 'café' has the plural form los cafés while the noun el tabú 'taboo' has the plural forms los tabús and los tabúes.
Spanish verbs are conjugated in three persons, each having a singular and a plural form. In some varieties of Spanish, such as that of the Río de la Plata Region, a special form of the second person is used. Spanish is a pro-drop language, meaning that subject pronouns are often omitted.
For example, in Spanish, nouns composed of a verb and its plural object usually have the verb first and noun object last (e.g. the legendary monster chupacabras, literally "sucks-goats", or in a more natural English formation "goatsucker") and the plural form of the object noun is retained in both the singular and plural forms of the compound ...
Similarly, the participle agrees with the subject when it is used with ser to form the "true" passive voice (e.g. La carta fue escrita ayer 'The letter was written [got written] yesterday.'), and also when it is used with estar to form a "passive of result", or stative passive (as in La carta ya está escrita 'The letter is already written.').
Spanish pronouns in some ways work quite differently from their English counterparts. Subject pronouns are often omitted, and object pronouns come in clitic and non-clitic forms. When used as clitics, object pronouns can appear as proclitics that come before the verb or as enclitics attached to the end of the verb in different linguistic ...
In some languages, including English, expressions that appear to be singular in form may be treated as plural if they are used with a plural sense, as in the government are agreed. The reverse is also possible: the United States is a powerful country. See synesis, and also English plural § Singulars as plural and plurals as singular.