Spanish grammar


Spanish is a grammatically inflected language. 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.
Spanish was the first of the European vernaculars to have a grammar treatise, Gramática de la lengua castellana, written in 1492 by the Andalusian philologist Antonio de Nebrija and presented to Queen Isabella of Castile at Salamanca.
The Real Academia Española traditionally dictates the normative rules of the Spanish language, as well as its orthography.
Formal differences between Peninsular and American Spanish are remarkably few, and someone who has learned the dialect of one area will generally have no difficulties using formal speech in the other; however, pronunciation does vary, as well as grammar and vocabulary.
Recently published comprehensive Spanish reference grammars in English include,, and.

Verbs

Every Spanish verb belongs to one of three form classes, characterized by the infinitive ending: -ar, -er, or -ir—sometimes called the first, second, and third conjugations, respectively.
A Spanish verb has nine indicative tenses with more-or-less direct English equivalents: the present tense, the preterite, the imperfect, the present perfect, the past perfect — also called the pluperfect, the future, the future perfect, the conditional simple and the conditional perfect.
In most dialects, each tense has six potential forms, varying for first, second, or third person and for singular or plural number. In the second person, Spanish maintains the so-called "T–V distinction" between familiar and formal modes of address. The formal second-person pronouns take third-person verb forms.
The second-person familiar plural is expressed in most of Spain with the pronoun vosotros and its characteristic verb forms, while in Latin American Spanish it merges with the formal second-person plural. Thus ustedes is used as both the formal and familiar second-person pronoun in Latin America.
In many areas of Latin America, the second-person familiar singular pronoun tú is replaced by vos, which frequently requires its own characteristic verb forms, especially in the present indicative, where the endings are -ás, -és, and -ís for -ar, -er, -ir verbs, respectively. See "voseo".
In the tables of paradigms below, the subject pronouns appear in parentheses.

Present indicative

The present indicative is used to express actions or states of being in a present time frame. For example:
SingularPlural
First person hablo hablamos
Second person familiar hablas
hablás/habláis		 habláis
Second person formal habla hablan
Third person habla hablan

SingularPlural
First person como comemos
Second person familiar comes
comés/coméis		 coméis
Second person formal come comen
Third person come comen

SingularPlural
First person vivo vivimos
Second person familiar vives
vivís		 vivís
Second person formal vive viven
Third person vive viven

Past tenses

Spanish has a number of verb tenses used to express actions or states of being in a past time frame. The two that are "simple" in form are the preterite and the imperfect.

Preterite

The preterite is used to express actions or events that took place in the past, and which were instantaneous or are viewed as completed. For example:
SingularPlural
First person hablé hablamos
Second person familiar hablaste hablasteis
Second person formal habló hablaron
Third person habló hablaron

SingularPlural
First person comí comimos
Second person familiar comiste comisteis
Second person formal comió comieron
Third person comió comieron

SingularPlural
First person viví vivimos
Second person familiar viviste vivisteis
Second person formal vivió vivieron
Third person vivió vivieron

Note that for -ar and -ir verbs, the first-person plural form is the same as that of the present indicative; and -er and -ir verbs share the same set of endings.

Imperfect or "copretérito"

The imperfect expresses actions or states that are viewed as ongoing in the past. For example:
All three of the sentences above describe "non-instantaneous" actions that are viewed as continuing in the past. The characteristic in the first sentence and the action in the second were continuous, not instantaneous occurrences. In the third sentence, the speaker focuses on the action in progress, not on its beginning or end.
SingularPlural
First person hablaba hablábamos
Second person familiar hablabas hablabais
Second person formal hablaba hablaban
Third person hablaba hablaban

SingularPlural
First person comía comíamos
Second person familiar comías comíais
Second person formal comía comían
Third person comía comían

SingularPlural
First person vivía vivíamos
Second person familiar vivías vivíais
Second person formal vivía vivían
Third person vivía vivían

Note that for all verbs in the imperfect, the first- and third-person singular share the same form; and -er and -ir verbs share the same set of endings.

Using preterite and imperfect together

The preterite and the imperfect can be combined in the same sentence to express the occurrence of an event in one clause during an action or state expressed in another clause. For example:
In all three cases, an event or completed action interrupts an ongoing state or action. For example, in the second sentence, the speaker states that he was in his room when the other person "interrupted" that state by entering.

Present progressive and imperfect progressive

The present and imperfect progressive both are used to express ongoing, progressive action in the present and past, respectively. For example:
The present progressive is formed by first conjugating the verb estar or seguir, depending on context, to the subject, and then attaching a gerund of the verb that follows. The past progressive simply requires the estar or seguir to be conjugated, depending on context, in imperfect, with respect to the subject.

Forming gerunds

To form the gerund of an -ar verb, replace the -ar of the infinitive with -ando;
e.g. jugar, hablar, caminar → jugando, hablando, caminando.
For -er or -ir verbs, replace the -er or -ir ending with -iendo;
e.g. comer, escribir, dormir → comiendo, escribiendo, durmiendo.
In -er verbs whose stem ends with a vowel, the i of the -iendo ending is replaced by y: e.g. leer, traer, creer → leyendo, trayendo, creyendo.
In -ir verbs whose stem ends with e—such as reír and sonreír—the stem vowel e is raised to i, and this i merges with the i of the -iendo ending; e.g. reír, freír → riendo, friendo.

Subjunctive

The subjunctive of a verb is used to express certain connotations in sentences such as a wish or desire, a demand, an emotion, uncertainty, or doubt.

Present subjunctive

Normally, a verb would be conjugated in the present indicative to indicate an event in the present frame of time.
If the sentence expresses a desire, demand, or emotion, or something similar, in the present tense, the subjunctive is used.
The subjunctive is also used to convey doubt, denial, or uncertainty.
In the first two examples, the ideally likable friend has not yet been found and remains an uncertainty, and authors "who write that" are not known to exist. In the third, possibility is not certainty, but rather a conjecture, and the last expresses clear doubt. Thus, subjunctive is used.
Some of the phrases and verbs that require sentences to have subjunctive formation include:
Some phrases that require the indicative instead, because they express certainty, include:
To form the first-person singular subjunctive, first take the present indicative first-person singular form of a verb. For example, the verbs hablar, comer, and vivir → Yo hablo, yo como, yo vivo. Then, replace the ending 'o' with the "opposite ending". This is done in the following way: if the verb is an -er or -ir verb such as comer, poder, vivir, or compartir, replace the ending 'o' with an 'a' i.e. : Yo como; yo puedo; yo vivo → Yo coma; yo pueda; yo viva. If the verb is an -ar verb such as hablar or caminar replace the ending 'o' with an 'e' i.e. : Yo hablo; yo camino → Yo hable, yo camine. This forms the first-person conjugation. The other conjugations work similarly, as follows:
Since the vos forms are derived from vosotros the following would be expected
However, the Royal Spanish Academy, following Argentinian usage, recommends using the tú forms:
Today, the two forms of the imperfect subjunctive are largely interchangeable.* The -se form derives from the Latin pluperfect subjunctive, while the -ra form derives from the Latin pluperfect indicative. The use of one or the other is largely a matter of personal taste and dialect. Many only use the -ra forms in speech, but vary between the two in writing. Many may spontaneously use either, or even prefer the rarer -se forms. The imperfect subjunctive is formed for basically the same reasons as the present subjunctive, but is used for other tenses and time frames.

Nouns

In Spanish, as in other Romance languages, all nouns belong to one of two genders, "masculine" or "feminine", and many adjectives change their form to agree in gender with the noun they modify. For most nouns that refer to persons, grammatical gender matches biological gender.

Adjectives

Spanish generally 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.
Spanish uses determiners in a similar way to English. The main difference is that they inflect for both number and gender. Common determiners include el, un, este, mucho, alguno, and so on.

Pronouns

Spanish pronouns fall into the same broad categories as English pronouns do: personal, demonstrative, interrogative, relative, and possessive. The personal pronouns–those that vary in form according to whether they represent the first, second, or third grammatical person–include a variety of second-person forms that differ not only according to number, but also according to formality or the social relation between speakers. Additionally, these second-person forms vary according to geographical region. Because the form of a conjugated verb reflects the person and number of its subject, subject pronouns are usually omitted, except where they are felt to be needed for emphasis or disambiguation.

Adverbs

Spanish adverbs work much like their English counterparts, e.g. muy, poco, lejos, mucho, casi, etc. To form adverbs from adjectives, the adverbial suffix -mente is generally added to the feminine singular of the adjective, whether or not it differs from the masculine singular. Thus:
The adjectives bueno and malo have irregular adverbial forms: bien and mal, respectively.
As in English, some adverbs are identical to their adjectival counterparts. Thus words such as temprano, lento, and hondo can also mean "early" "slowly", and "deeply", respectively.
In series of consecutive adverbs that would each end in -mente on their own, the -mente is dropped from all but the final adverb, and the others are left as if they were adjectives in the feminine singular. Thus:
There are also a wide variety of adverbial phrases in Spanish, such as a menudo, en todas partes, de repente, por fin, and sin embargo.
As with adjectives, the comparative of adverbs is almost always formed by placing más or menos before the adverb. Thus más temprano, más rápidamente, menos interesantemente, etc. The superlative is formed by placing the neuter article lo before the comparative, although it is generally used with an additional qualifier phrase such as que puedas or de todos : lo más rápidamente que puedas, lo más interesantemente de todos, lo menos claramente de ellos, etc. As with their corresponding adjectival forms, bien and mal have irregular comparative forms and peor, and más and menos are the comparatives of mucho and poco, respectively.

Prepositions

Spanish has a relatively large number of prepositions, and does not use postpositions. The following list is traditionally cited:

Recently, two new prepositions have been added: durante and mediante, usually placed at the end to preserve the list.
This list includes two archaic prepositions, but leaves out two new Latinisms as well as a large number of very important compound prepositions.
Prepositions in Spanish do not change a verb's meaning as they do in English. For example, to translate "run out of water", "run up a bill", "run down a pedestrian", and "run in a thief" into Spanish requires completely different verbs, and not simply the use of correr plus the corresponding Spanish preposition. This is more due to the nature of English phrasal verbs rather than an inherent function of Spanish verbs or prepositions.

Conjunctions

The Spanish conjunctions y and o alter their form in both spoken and written language to e and u respectively when followed by an identical vowel sound. Thus, padre e hijo, Fernando e Isabel, sujeto u objeto, vertical u horizontal.
The change does not take place before the i of a diphthong, as in acero y hierro. Nor does the conjunction y change when initial in a question, as in ¿Y Inés?.
When the conjunction o appears between numerals, it is usually spelled with an accent mark, in order to distinguish it from zero ; thus, 2 ó 3 in contrast to 203.

Syntax and syntactic variation

Order of constituents

Spanish unmarked word order for affirmative declarative sentences is subject-verb-object ; however, as in other Romance languages, in practice, word order is more variable, with topicalization and focus being the primary factors in the selection of a particular order. Verb-subject-object, verb-object-subject, and object-verb-subject are also relatively common, while other orders are very uncommon outside of poetry.
Thus, to simply say, "My friend wrote the book", one would say :
Although bare VSO and VOS are somewhat rare in declarative independent clauses, they are quite common in sentences in which something other than the subject or direct object functions as the focus. For example:
In many dependent clauses, the verb is placed before the subject to avoid placing the verb in final position:
A sentence in which the direct object is the topic or "theme", while the subject is part of the comment, or "rheme", often assumes OVS order. In this case the direct object noun phrase is supplemented with the appropriate direct object pronoun; for example:
Because subject pronouns are often dropped, one will often see sentences with a verb and direct object but no explicitly stated subject.
In questions, VSO is usual :
Yes/no questions, regardless of constituent order, are generally distinguished from declarative sentences by context and intonation.

Cleft sentences

A cleft sentence is one formed with the copular verb, 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:
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 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 not a cleaver but a nominalising relative pronoun meaning "the 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 permutation would, to a native speaker, give a subtly different shading of emphasis.
For example, we can say Juan fue el que perdió las llaves or El que perdió las llaves fue Juan. As can be seen from the translations, if this word order is chosen, English stops using the cleft structure whilst in Spanish no words have changed.
Here are some examples of such sentences:
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.
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:
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 :
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.
In the singular, the subordinate clause can agree either with 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
;Plural

Forms of address

The use of usted and ustedes as a polite form of address is universal. However, there are variations in informal address. Ustedes replaces vosotros in much of Andalusia, the Canary Islands and Latin America, except in the liturgical or poetic of styles. In some parts of Andalusia, the pronoun ustedes is used with the standard vosotros endings.
Depending on the region, Latin Americans may also replace the singular tú with usted or vos. The choice of pronoun is a tricky issue and can even vary from village to village. Travellers are often advised to play it safe and call everyone usted.
A feature of the speech of the Dominican Republic and other areas where syllable-final /s/ is completely silent is that there is no audible difference between the second- and third-person singular form of the verb. This leads to redundant pronoun use, for example, the tagging on of ¿tú ves? to the ends of sentences, where other speakers would say ¿ves?.

''Voseo''

Vos was used in medieval Castilian as a polite form, like the French vous and the Italian voi, and it used the same forms as vosotros. This gave three levels of formality:
Whereas vos was lost in standard Spanish, some dialects lost tú, and began using vos as the informal pronoun. The exact connotations of this practice, called voseo, depend on the dialect. In certain countries there may be socioeconomic implications. El voseo uses the pronoun vos for tú, but maintains te as an object pronoun and tu and tuyo as possessives.
In voseo, verbs corresponding to vos in the present indicative, are formed from the second person plural. If the second person plural ends in áis or éis, the form for vos drops the i:
Similarly the verb ser has:
If the second person plural ends in -ís, then the form for vos is identical:
In the imperative, the form for vos is also derived from the second person plural. The latter ends always in -d. So for the form for vos this d is removed, and if the verb has more than one syllable, an accent is added to the last vowel:
The only exception to these rules is in the verb ir, which does not have an imperative form for vos and uses the analogous form of the verb andar, which has a similar meaning, and is regular:
In the present subjunctive, the same rules as for the present indicative apply, though these forms coexist in Argentina with those for the pronoun tú:
Or:
Other tenses always have the same form for vos as for tú.
Outside Argentina, other combinations are possible. For instance, people in Maracaibo may use standard vosotros endings for vos .

''Vosotros'' imperative: ''-ar'' for ''-ad''

In Spain, colloquially, the infinitive is used instead of the normative imperative for vosotros. This is not accepted in the normative language.
A form used for centuries but never accepted normatively has an -s ending in the second person singular of the preterite or simple past. For example, lo hicistes instead of the normative lo hiciste; hablastes tú for hablaste tú. That is the only instance in which the tú form does not end in an -s in the normative language.
Ladino has gone further with hablates.

Third-person object pronoun variation

The third-person direct-object and indirect-object pronouns exhibit variation from region to region, from one individual to another, and even within the language of single individuals. The Real Academia Española prefers an "etymological" usage, one in which the indirect object function is carried by le, and the direct object function is carried by la or lo.
The Academy also condones the use of le as a direct object form for masculine, animate antecedents. Deviations from these approved usages are named leísmo, and laísmo and loísmo. The object pronoun variation is studied in detail by.
Here are some examples for this:
in Spanish are typically introduced by the complementizer que, and such a noun clause may serve as the object of the preposition de, resulting in the sequence de que in the standard language. This sequence, in turn, is often reduced colloquially to just que, and this reduction is called queísmo.
Some speakers, by way of hypercorrection, insert de before que in contexts where it is not prescribed in standard grammar. This insertion of "extraneous" de before que — called dequeísmo — is generally associated with less-educated speakers.