Spanish verbs
Verbs can be used in other forms, such as the present progressive, but in grammar treatises they are not usually considered a part of the paradigm but rather periphrastic verbal constructions.
Spanish verbs are inflected to convey mood, tense, voice, and aspect, and to agree with person and number.
Spanish has different pronouns (and verb forms) for "you," depending on the relationship, familiar or formal, between speaker and addressee.
Non-finite verb forms refer to an action or state without indicating the time or person, and it is not conjugated for subject.
The now-mostly archaic present participle, which ended in -ante or -iente and formerly filled this function, in some cases survives as such an adjective (e.g. durmiente ("sleeping"), interesante ("interesting")), but they are limited, and in cases where it does not, other constructions must be used to express the same ideas: where in English one would say "the crying baby", one would say in Spanish el bebé que llora ("the baby who's crying"; llorante is archaic).
When the past participle is used as an adjective, it inflects for both gender and number – for example, una lengua hablada en España ("a language spoken in Spain").
Continuous forms (such as estoy hablando) are usually not considered part of the verbal paradigm, though they often appear in books addressed to English speakers who are learning Spanish.
The following endings are attached to it: Uses The conditional is used to express the following: All the compound tenses are formed with haber followed by the past participle of the main verb.
It is very rare in spoken Spanish, but it is sometimes used in formal written language, where it is almost entirely limited to subordinate (temporal, adverbial) clauses.
The subjunctive supplements the imperative in all other cases (negative expressions and the conjugations corresponding to the pronouns nosotros, él/ella, usted, ellos/ellas, and ustedes).
The pronominal verb irse is irregular in the second person plural normative form, because it does not drop the -d or the -r: The subjunctive mood has a separate conjugation table with fewer tenses.
It is used, almost exclusively in subordinate clauses, to express the speaker's opinion or judgment, such as doubts, possibilities, emotions, and events that may or may not occur.
Note that since the preterite by nature refers to an event seen as having a beginning and an end, and not as a context, the use of the continuous form of the verb only adds a feeling for the length of time spent on the action.
English has just one past-tense form, which can have aspect added to it by auxiliary verbs, but not in ways that reliably correspond to what occurs in Spanish.
E.g.: Esta mañana comí huevos y pan tostado ("This morning I ate eggs and toast") Key words and phrases that tend to co-occur with the imperfect tense:
Consider, for example, the phrase "the sun shone" in the following contexts: In the first two, it is clear that the shining refers to the background to the events that are about to unfold in the story.
It is talking about a single event presented as occurring at a specific point in time (the moment John pulled back the curtain).
In both languages, the continuous form for action in progress is optional, but Spanish requires the verb in either case to be in the imperfect, because it is the background to the specific event expressed by "ran over", in the preterite.
For example, Shakira Mebarak in her song "Ciega, Sordomuda" sings, The subjunctive mood expresses wishes and hypothetical events.
Only ser is used to equate one noun phrase with another, and thus it is the verb for expressing a person's occupation ("Mi hermano es estudiante"/"My brother is a student").
For the same reason, ser is used for telling the date or the time, regardless of whether the subject is explicit ("Hoy es miércoles"/"Today is Wednesday") or merely implied ("Son las ocho"/"It's eight o'clock").
Ser generally focuses on the essence of the subject, and specifically on qualities that include: Estar generally focuses on the condition of the subject, and specifically on qualities that include: In English, the sentence "The boy is boring" uses a different adjective than "The boy is bored".
For example: When ser is used with the past participle of a verb, it forms the "true" passive voice, expressing an event ("El libro fue escrito en 2005"/"The book was written in 2005").
As habeō began to degrade and become reduced to just ambiguous monosyllables in the present tense, the Iberian Romance languages (Spanish, Gallician-Portuguese, and Catalan) restricted its use and started to use teneō as the ordinary verb expressing having and possession.
The y is presumed to be a fossilized form of the mediaeval Castilian clitic pronoun y or i, once meaning "there", but now semantically empty, historically cognate with French y, Catalan hi and Italian vi from Latin ibi.
This echoes constructions seen in languages such as French (il y a = "it there has"), Catalan (hi ha = "[it] there has"), and even Chinese (有 yǒu = "[it] has"): To form perfect constructions, the past participle habido is used: It is possible, in certain types of emphasis, to put the verb after the object: There is a tendency to make haber agree with what follows, as though it were the subject, particularly in tenses other than the present indicative.
There is heavier stigma on inventing plural forms for hay, but hain, han, and suchlike are sometimes encountered in non-standard speech.
The phrase haber que (in the third person singular and followed by a subordinated construction with the verb in the infinitive) carries the meaning of necessity or obligation without specifying an agent.
This contrasts with English, where verbs tend to emphasize manner, and the direction of motion is left to helper particles, prepositions, or adverbs.
For example: La llevé al aeropuerto en coche, pero se le había olvidado el tiquete, así que fuimos a casa [en coche] por él, luego volvimos [en coche] hacia el aeropuerto, pero luego tuvimos que volver [en coche] por el pasaporte, y ya era imposible que consiguiésemos facturar el equipaje... = "I drove her to the airport, but she had forgotten her ticket, so we drove home to get it, then drove back towards the airport, but then had to drive back home for her passport, by which time there was zero chance of checking in..."Spanish verbal nouns (e.g. "running", "coming", "thinking" in English) are identical in form to the infinitive of the verb from which they are derived, and their gender is masculine.
