Spanish grammar

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.

Differences between formal varieties of Peninsular and American Spanish are remarkably few, and someone who has learned the language in one area will generally have no difficulties of communication in the other; however, pronunciation does vary, as well as grammar and vocabulary.

Recently published comprehensive Spanish reference grammars in English include DeBruyne (1996), Butt & Benjamin (2011), and Batchelor & San José (2010).

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.

For example: Spanish has a number of verb tenses used to express actions or states of being in a past time frame.

To form the gerund of an -ar verb, replace the -ar of the infinitive with -ando; e.g. jugar, hablar, caminar → jugando, hablando, caminando.

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 (yo) form of a verb.

Spanish adverbs work much like their English counterparts, e.g. muy ("very"), poco ("a little"), lejos ("far"), mucho ("much, a lot"), casi ("almost"), etc.

Thus: There are also a wide variety of adverbial phrases in Spanish, such as a menudo ("often"), en todas partes ("everywhere"), de repente ("suddenly"), por fin ("finally"), and sin embargo ("however, nevertheless").

The following list is traditionally cited: A, ante, bajo, cabe, con, contra, de, desde, en, entre, hacia, hasta, para, por, según, sin, so, sobre, tras.Recently, two new prepositions have been added: durante and mediante, usually placed at the end to preserve the list (which is usually learnt by heart by Spanish students).

The Spanish conjunctions y ('and') and o ('or') alter their form in both spoken and written language to e and u respectively when followed by an identical vowel sound.

Nor does the conjunction y change when initial in a question (where it serves to introduce or reintroduce a name as a topic, rather than to link one element with another), as in ¿Y Inés?

Verb-subject-object (VSO), verb-object-subject (VOS), and object-verb-subject (OVS) 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 (SVO): 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 (and thus often VSO or VOS) to avoid placing the verb in final position: 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.

Provided we respect the pairings 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.

Clitics, on the other hand, have been given relatively less thought and investigation, particularly an inquiry into an uncomplicated approach in their syntactic distribution.

Clitics offer a myriad of functional roles depending upon the language in question, further complicating the situation.

While Spanish is said to generally have flexible or "free" word order, others such as Pountain assert that the syntax is heavily influenced by topic and comment identification.

[5] The syntactic role of the clitic se and its forms in Spanish has undergone much debate within the research with no obvious conclusion.

Part of the difficulty stems from the variable role se and its other forms play with regard to the contextual grammar.

As a class, clitics have such a variety of grammatical functions that they are not always pronominal, anaphoric or related to verbal arguments.

Another review of sentence positions of se in various grammatical constructions offers the following example, demonstrating imperative differences thus: Ábreloopen.2SG.IMP-CL.ACCÁbreloopen.2SG.IMP-CL.ACC"Open it.

[10] This widely discussed theory has involved raising of the clitic se as an unaccusative because of the lack of external argument in the grammar structure.

Daussá’s realization of syntactic structure presents a solution for the paradigmatic issue of se using AgrO and AgrS.

Ustedes replaces vosotros in part of Andalusia, the Canary Islands, and Latin America, except in the liturgical or poetic of styles.

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.

A form used for centuries but never accepted normatively has an -s ending in the second person singular of the preterite or simple past.

The Academy also condones the use of le as a direct object form for masculine, animate antecedents (i.e. male humans).

Some speakers, by way of hypercorrection (i.e. in an apparent effort to avoid the "error" of queísmo), insert de before que in contexts where it is not prescribed in standard grammar.