Spanish object pronouns

Last updated

Spanish object pronouns are Spanish personal pronouns that take the function of the object in the sentence. Object pronouns may be both clitic and non-clitic, with non-clitic forms carrying greater emphasis. When used as clitics, object pronouns are generally proclitic, i.e. they appear before the verb of which they are the object; enclitic pronouns (i.e. pronouns attached to the end of the verb) appear with positive imperatives, infinitives, and gerunds. Non-clitic forms, by contrast, can appear anywhere in the sentence but can only rarely be used without their clitic counterparts. When used together, clitic pronouns cluster in specific orders based primarily on person, and clitic doubling is often found as well. In many dialects in Central Spain, including that of Madrid, there exists the phenomenon of leísmo , which is using the indirect object pronoun le as the direct object pronoun where most other dialects would use lo (masculine) or la (feminine).

Contents

History

As the history of the Spanish language saw the shedding of Latin declensions, only the subject and prepositional object survived as independent personal pronouns in Spanish: the rest became clitics. These clitics may be proclitic or enclitic, or doubled for emphasis. [1] In modern Spanish, the placement of clitic pronouns is determined morphologically by the form of the verb. Clitics precede most conjugated verbs but come after infinitives, gerunds, and positive imperatives. For example: me vio but verme, viéndome, ¡véame! Exceptions exist for certain idiomatic expressions, like "once upon a time" (Érase una vez). [2]

PersonLatinSpanish
1st sg.

EGŌ (nominative)
MIHI (dative)
MĒ (accusative)
MĒCUM (ablative MĒ + CUM "with")

yo (nominative)
mí (prepositional)
me (unstressed/clitic)
conmigo (comitative)

1st pl.

NŌS (nominative/accusative)
NŌBĪS (dative/ablative)
NŌBĪSCUM (ablative NŌBĪS + CUM "with")

nosotros, nosotras (nominative/prepositional)
nos (accusative/dative)
connosco (comitative, archaic)

2nd sg.

TŪ (nominative)
TIBI (dative)
TĒ (accusative)
TĒCUM (ablative TĒ + CUM "with")

tú (nominative)
ti (prepositional)
te (accusative/dative)
contigo (comitative)

2nd pl.

VŌS (nominative/accusative)
VŌBĪS (dative/ablative)
VŌBĪSCUM (ablative VŌBĪS + CUM "with")

vosotros, vosotras (nominative/prepositional)
os (accusative/dative)
convosco (comitative, archaic)

3rd sg.

ILLE, ILLA, ILLUD (nominative)
ILLĪ (dative)
ILLUM, ILLAM, ILLUD (accusative)

él, ella, ello (nominative/prepositional)
le (dative), se (dative, alongside an accusative pronoun) [lower-alpha 1]
lo, la (accusative)

3rd pl.

ILLĪ, ILLAE (nominative)
ILLĪS (dative)
ILLŌS, ILLĀS (accusative)

ellos, ellas (nominative/prepositional)
les (dative)
los, las (accusative)

3rd refl. (sg. & pl.)

SIBI (dative)
SĒ/SĒSĒ (accusative)
SĒCUM (ablative SĒ + CUM "with")

sí (prepositional)
se (accusative/dative)
consigo (comitative)

Old Spanish

Unstressed pronouns in Old Spanish were governed by rules different from those in modern Spanish. [1] The old rules were more determined by syntax than by morphology: [2] the pronoun followed the verb, except when the verb was preceded (in the same clause) by a stressed word, such as a noun, adverb, or stressed pronoun. [1]

For example, from Cantar de Mio Cid :

If the first stressed word of a clause was in the future or conditional tense, or if it was a compound verb made up of haber + a participle, then any unstressed pronoun was placed between the two elements of the compound verb [1] (this process still applies in European Portuguese where it is called mesoclisis).

Before the 15th century, clitics never appeared in the initial position; not even after a coordinating conjunction or a caesura. They could, however, precede a conjugated verb if there was a negative or adverbial marker. For example:

The same rule applied to gerunds, infinitives, and imperatives. The forms of the future and the conditional functioned like any other verb conjugated with respect to the clitics. But a clitic following a future or conditional was usually placed between the infinitive root and the inflection. For example:

Early Modern Spanish

By the 15th century, Early Modern Spanish had developed "proclisis", in which an object's agreement markers come before the verb. According to Andrés Enrique-Arias, this shift helped speed up language processing of complex morphological material in the verb's inflection (including time, manner, and aspect). [3]

This proclisis (ascenso de clítico) was a syntactic movement away from the idea that an object must follow the verb. For example, in these two sentences with the same meaning: [4]

  1. María quiere comprarlo = "Maria wants to buy it."
  2. María lo quiere comprar = "Maria wants to buy it."

"Lo" is the object of "comprar" in the first example, but Spanish allows that clitic to appear in a preverbal position of a syntagma that it dominates strictly, as in the second example. This movement only happens in conjugated verbs. But a special case occurs for the imperative, where we see the postverbal position of the clitic

This is accounted for by a second syntactic movement wherein the verb "passes by" the clitic that has already "ascended".

Usage

Spanish object pronouns come in two forms: clitic and non-clitic, or stressed. Clitics, by definition, cannot function independently, and they therefore must appear attached to a host (a verb [2] or preposition). With verbs, clitics may appear as proclitics before the verb or as enclitics attached to the end of the verb, with proclitization being significantly more common. When used together, clitic pronouns cluster in specific orders, and the process of enclitization is subject to certain rules in which sounds are dropped. Non-clitic pronouns, by contrast, are the stressed form of object pronouns; they are formed with the preposition a ("to") and the prepositional case of the pronoun. In contrast to clitic pronouns, non-clitic pronouns can appear anywhere in the sentence, but with very few exceptions, they cannot be used without their clitic counterparts (a process known as clitic doubling).

When used as clitics, object pronouns are generally proclitic, i.e. they appear before the verb of which they are the object. Thus:

In certain environments, however, enclitic pronouns (i.e. pronouns attached to the end of the verb or a word derived from a verb) may appear. Enclitization is generally only found with:

With positive imperatives, enclitization is always mandatory:

With negative imperatives, however, proclitization is mandatory:

With infinitives and gerunds, enclitization is often, but not always, mandatory. With bare infinitives, enclitization is mandatory:

In compound infinitives that make use of the past participle (i.e. all perfect and passive infinitives), enclitics attach to the uninflected auxiliary verb and not the past participle itself:

In compound infinitives that make use of the gerund, however, enclitics may attach to either the gerund itself or the main verb, including the rare cases when the gerund is used together with the past participle in a single infinitive:

With bare gerunds, enclitization is once again mandatory. In compound gerunds, enclitics attach to the same word as they would in the infinitive, and one has the same options with combinations of gerunds as with gerunds used in infinitives:

In constructions that make use of infinitives or gerunds as arguments of a conjugated verb, clitic pronouns may appear as proclitics before the verb (as in most verbal constructions) or simply as enclitics attached to the infinitive or gerund itself. Similarly, in combinations of infinitives, enclitics may attach to any one infinitive:

Enclitics may be found in other environments in literary and archaic language, but such constructions are virtually absent from everyday speech.

Enclitization is subject to the following rules:

Non-clitic, or stressed pronouns, on the other hand, do not require a host, and they can thus be placed anywhere in the sentence. With very few exceptions, however, they must be used along with their clitic equivalents:

Non-clitic accusative pronouns cannot have impersonal antecedents; impersonal accusative clitics must therefore be used with their antecedents instead:

Impersonal dative clitic pronouns, however, may be stressed as such:

In a similar vein, impersonal accusative clitics are occasionally used to provide a degree of emphasis to the sentence as a whole:

Combinations of clitic pronouns

In Spanish, up to two (and rarely three) clitic pronouns can be used with a single verb, generally one accusative and one dative. Whether proclitic or enclitic, they cluster in the following order: [5] [6]

1234
sete
os		me
nos		lo, la,
los, las,
le, les

Thus:

When an accusative third-person non-reflexive pronoun (lo, la, los, or las) is used with a dative pronoun that is understood to also be third-person non-reflexive (le or les), the dative pronoun is replaced by se:

If se is being used as a reflexive indirect object, however, it is often, though not always, disambiguated with a sí:

Only one accusative clitic can be used with a single verb, and the same is true for any one type of dative clitic. When more than one accusative clitic or dative clitic of a specific type is used, therefore, the verb or preposition must be repeated for each clitic used:

Occasionally, however, with verbs such as dejar ("to let"), which generally takes a direct object as well as a subsequent verb as a further grammatical argument, objects of two different verbs will appear together and thus may appear to be objects of the same verb:

Like Latin, Spanish makes use of double dative constructions, and thus up to two dative clitics can be used with a single verb. One must be the dative of benefit (or "ethical" dative, i.e. someone (or something) who is indirectly affected by the action), and the other must refer to the direct recipient of the action itself. Context is generally sufficient to determine which is which:

Clitic doubling

Clitic doubling is a common occurrence in Spanish and, in addition to providing emphasis, often occurs for purely grammatical reasons, most often with dative clitics but sometimes with accusative clitics as well. All non-clitic indirect objects as well as the majority of personal non-clitic direct objects must be preceded by the preposition a, and an appropriate dative clitic pronoun is thus often used to distinguish between the two. With indirect objects that come before the verb, clitic doubling is mandatory in the active voice: [5]

With indirect objects that come after the verb, however, clitic doubling is usually optional, though generally preferred in spoken language:

Nevertheless, with the ethical dative as well as the dative of inalienable possession, clitic doubling is most often mandatory:

With indefinite pronouns, however, clitic doubling is optional even in these constructions:

In the passive voice, where direct objects do not exist at all, non-emphatic clitic doubling is always optional, even with personal pronouns:

Non-emphatic clitic doubling with accusative clitics is much rarer. It generally only occurs with:

Thus:

Accusative clitic doubling is also used in object-verb-subject (OVS) word order to signal topicalization. The appropriate direct object pronoun is placed between the direct object and the verb, and thus in the sentence La carne la come el perro ("The dog eats the meat") there is no confusion about which is the subject of the sentence (el perro).

Clitic doubling is often necessary to modify clitic pronouns, whether accusative or dative. The non-clitic form of the accusative is usually identical to that of the dative, although non-clitic accusative pronouns cannot be used to refer to impersonal things such as animals and inanimate objects. With attributive adjectives, nouns used with apposition (such as "us friends"), and the intensifier mismo, clitic doubling is mandatory, and the non-clitic form of the pronoun is used:

With predicative adjectives, however, clitic doubling is not necessary. Clitic pronouns may be directly modified by such adjectives, which must be placed immediately after the verb:

Prepositional and comitative cases

The prepositional case is used with the majority of prepositions: a mí, contra ti, bajo él, etc., although several prepositions, such as entre ("between, among") and según ("according to"), actually govern the nominative (or sí in the case of se): entre yo y mi hermano ("between me and my brother"), según tú ("according to you"), entre sí ("among themselves"), etc., with the exception of entre nos ("between us"), where the accusative may be used instead (entre nosotros is also acceptable). With the preposition con ("with"), however, the comitative is used instead. Yo, tú, and se have distinct forms in the comitative: conmigo, contigo, and consigo, respectively, in which the preposition becomes one word with its object and thus must not be repeated by itself: conmigo by itself means "with me", and con conmigo is redundant. For all other pronouns, the comitative is identical to the prepositional and is used in the same way: con él, con nosotros, con ellos, etc.

As with verbs, prepositions must be repeated for each pronoun they modify:

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Se in this case continues Old Spanish ge – cognate to Portuguese lhe and Italian gli.
  2. ↑ With reflexive verbs ending in -ir, an accent must be added to the i in order to break the diphthong, thus suscribíos ( [suskɾiˈβios] ) and not suscribios ( [susˈkɾiβjos] ).

Related Research Articles

In morphology and syntax, a clitic is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but depends phonologically on another word or phrase. In this sense, it is syntactically independent but phonologically dependent—always attached to a host. A clitic is pronounced like an affix, but plays a syntactic role at the phrase level. In other words, clitics have the form of affixes, but the distribution of function words.

In grammar, the dative case is a grammatical case used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in "Maria Jacobo potum dedit", Latin for "Maria gave Jacob a drink". In this example, the dative marks what would be considered the indirect object of a verb in English.

This article discusses the forms and functions of the personal pronouns in Catalan grammar.

The Portuguese personal pronouns and possessives display a higher degree of inflection than other parts of speech. Personal pronouns have distinct forms according to whether they stand for a subject (nominative), a direct object (accusative), an indirect object (dative), or a reflexive object. Several pronouns further have special forms used after prepositions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spanish grammar</span> Grammar of the Spanish language

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. Nouns follow a two-gender system and are marked for number. Personal pronouns are inflected for person, number, gender, and a very reduced case system; the Spanish pronominal system represents a simplification of the ancestral Latin system.

Italian grammar is the body of rules describing the properties of the Italian language. Italian words can be divided into the following lexical categories: articles, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections.

French personal pronouns reflect the person and number of their referent, and in the case of the third person, its gender as well. They also reflect the role they play in their clause: subject, direct object, indirect object, or other.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tuscan dialect</span> Italo-Dalmatian variety mainly spoken in the Italian region of Tuscany

Tuscan is a set of Italo-Dalmatian varieties of Romance spoken in Tuscany, Corsica, and Sardinia.

In linguistics, clitic doubling, or pronominal reduplication is a phenomenon by which clitic pronouns appear in verb phrases together with the full noun phrases that they refer to.

The dative construction is a grammatical way of constructing a sentence, using the dative case. A sentence is also said to be in dative construction if the subject and the object can switch their places for a given verb, without altering the verb's structure. The latter case is not to be confused with the passive voice, where only the direct object of a sentence becomes the subject of the passive-voiced sentence, and the verb's structure also changes to convey the meaning of the passive voice. The dative construction tends to occur when the verb indicates a state rather than an action.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spanish pronouns</span>

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 environments. There is also regional variation in the use of pronouns, particularly the use of the informal second-person singular vos and the informal second-person plural vosotros.

Romanian nouns, under the rules of Romanian grammar, are declined, varying by gender, number, and case.

Ancient Greek grammar is morphologically complex and preserves several features of Proto-Indo-European morphology. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns, articles, numerals and especially verbs are all highly inflected.

The grammar of Modern Greek, as spoken in present-day Greece and Cyprus, is essentially that of Demotic Greek, but it has also assimilated certain elements of Katharevousa, the archaic, learned variety of Greek imitating Classical Greek forms, which used to be the official language of Greece through much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Modern Greek grammar has preserved many features of Ancient Greek, but has also undergone changes in a similar direction as many other modern Indo-European languages, from more synthetic to more analytic structures.

Eastern Lombard grammar reflects the main features of Romance languages: the word order of Eastern Lombard is usually SVO, nouns are inflected in number, adjectives agree in number and gender with the nouns, verbs are conjugated in tenses, aspects and moods and agree with the subject in number and person. The case system is present only for the weak form of the pronoun.

A prepositional pronoun is a special form of a personal pronoun that is used as the object of a preposition.

This article discusses the grammar of the Western Lombard (Insubric) language. The examples are in Milanese, written according to the Classical Milanese orthography.

Old Church Slavonic is an inflectional language with moderately complex verbal and nominal systems.

Latin syntax is the part of Latin grammar that covers such matters as word order, the use of cases, tenses and moods, and the construction of simple and compound sentences, also known as periods.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spanish personal pronouns</span> Personal pronouns in Spanish

Spanish personal pronouns have distinct forms according to whether they stand for the subject (nominative) or object, and third-person pronouns make an additional distinction for direct object (accusative) or indirect object (dative), and for reflexivity as well. Several pronouns also have special forms used after prepositions.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Penny, Ralph J. (1991). A History of the Spanish Language. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 119, 123. ISBN   978-0-521-39481-9.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Pountain, Christopher J. (2001). A History of the Spanish Language Through Texts. Routledge. pp. 177, 264–5. ISBN   978-0-415-18062-7.
  3. ↑ Asín, Jaime Oliver (1941). Diana Artes Gráficas (ed.). Historia de la lengua española (6th ed.). Madrid. pp. 171–172. ISBN   978-0-415-18062-7.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  4. ↑ Zagona, Karen (2002). The Syntax of Spanish. Cambridge Syntax Guides. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 185–90. ISBN   978-0-521-57684-0.
  5. 1 2 "Pronombres Personales Átonos" [Unstressed Personal Pronouns]. Diccionario panhispánico de dudas [Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts] (in Spanish). Real Academia Española. Retrieved 9 April 2017.
  6. ↑ Perlmutter, David M. (1971). Deep and surface structure constraints in syntax . New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. ISBN   0030840104. OCLC   202861.

Bibliography

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.