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60-432: Spanish is a pro-drop language with respect to subject pronouns, and, like many European languages, Spanish makes a T-V distinction in second person pronouns that has no equivalent in modern English. Object pronouns can be both clitic and non-clitic, with non-clitic forms carrying greater emphasis. With clitic pronouns, proclitic forms are much more common, but enclitic forms are mandatory in certain situations. There

120-685: A generic form of address instead of a specifically respectful form. Vos and its related forms are still used in literature, cinema, etc., when attempting to depict the language of past centuries. The pronoun " vos " is used in some areas of Latin America, particularly in Central America, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile, the state of Zulia in Venezuela, and the Andean regions of Colombia, Bolivia, Perú, and Ecuador. These are all distant from

180-603: A highly inflected verbal morphology, the expression of the subject pronoun is considered unnecessary because the verbal inflection indicates the person and number of the subject, thus the referent of the null subject can be inferred from the grammatical inflection on the verb. Barbosa defines these typological patterns as null-subject languages (NSL), expressing that the term itself, pro-drop, can be subcategorized into categories such as: topic (discourse) pro-drop, partial NSL (partial pro-drop) and consistent NSL (full pro-drop). In everyday speech there are instances when who or what

240-601: A ratio of three to one. Besides the major varieties of English — American , British , Canadian , Australian , Irish , New Zealand English —and their sub-varieties, countries such as South Africa , India , Nigeria , the Philippines , Singapore , Jamaica , and Trinidad and Tobago also have millions of native speakers of dialect continua ranging from English-based creole languages to Standard English . Other countries and territories, such as Ghana , also use English as their primary official language even though it

300-501: A reflexive meaning, such as ir (to go) and irse (to go away). Some verbs only have reflexive forms, such as jactarse (to boast). The nominal intensifier in Spanish (equivalent to English "myself", "yourself", "themselves", etc. when used after a noun) is mismo , which in this case is placed after the noun it modifies and behaves like a normal adjective. Thus: Unlike English intensifiers, which are often placed several words after

360-432: A second-person function. They are now confined mostly to period works. It is unlikely that the similar-sounding Arabic أستاذ ( ʾustāḏ ), meaning "professor", was involved in the formation of Spanish usted because of the weakness of the semantic link and the fact that usted is not documented before 1598, over a century after the fall of Moorish Granada . Today, the informal second-person plural pronoun vosotros

420-676: A structural NP may be unexpressed, giving rise to a pronominal interpretation." (Bresnan 1982:384). The empty category assumed (under government and binding theory ) to be present in the vacant subject position left by pro-dropping is known as pro , or as " little pro " (to distinguish it from " big PRO ", an empty category associated with non-finite verb phrases). It has been observed that pro-drop languages are those with either rich inflection for person and number (Persian, Polish, Czech, Portuguese, etc.) or no such inflection at all (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc.), but languages that are intermediate (English, French) are non-pro-drop. While

480-484: A subject-prominent language. It is this topic-first nature that enables the inference of omitted pronouns from discourse. The following example from Jung (2004:719) Korean shows the omission of both pronouns in the subject and object position. 너 Neo you 이것 igeot this 필요하니? pilyohani? need 너 이것 필요하니? Neo igeot pilyohani? you this need Do you need this? 필요해 pilyohae need 필요해 pilyohae need ( I ) need ( it ). Consider

540-399: Is voso(s) / vosa(s) . Spanish is a pro-drop language with respect to subject pronouns. Information contained in verb endings often renders the explicit use of subject pronouns unnecessary and even erroneous although they may still be used for clarity or emphasis: English subject pronouns are generally not translated into Spanish if neither clarity nor emphasis is an issue. "I think"

600-449: Is a language in which certain classes of pronouns may be omitted when they can be pragmatically or grammatically inferable . The precise conditions vary from language to language, and can be quite intricate. The phenomenon of "pronoun-dropping" is part of the larger topic of zero or null anaphora . The connection between pro-drop languages and null anaphora relates to the fact that a dropped pronoun has referential properties, and so

660-604: Is also the primary native language and English is the primary language of government and education, such as Ireland , Gibraltar , and the Commonwealth Caribbean . While English is also spoken by a majority of people as a second language in a handful of countries such as Denmark , the Netherlands , Norway and Sweden , these countries are not considered part of the English-speaking world as

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720-935: Is also used to address God, in parallel with English's otherwise-abandoned use of thou . Usage changed in the 20th century in Spain, and a woman who addressed her mother as madre , 'mother' using usted could experience that her children call her mamá , 'mom' and use tú . Also, in Spain the Falangists and the Communists promoted the tuteo as a sign of worker solidarity. One can give offense by addressing someone with tú instead of usted , similar to inappropriately calling someone by their first name in English; conversely, it can also be awkward to use usted if tú would be expected, which suggests too much social distance or implies that

780-502: Is an older form of a contraction of vuestra merced . In Colombia, it is common for people to use su merced interchangeably with usted . Su merced can be used in the vocative case as well such as when speaking to an older person, as in Su merced, ¿por qué no vienen vusted y sus nietos a mi casa esta tarde? Vuestra merced (literally "your grace") is the origin of usted , usarcé and similar forms that govern third-person verb forms with

840-420: Is being referred to — namely, the topic of the sentence — can be inferred from context. Languages which permit the pronoun to be inferred from contextual information are called topic-drop (also known as discourse pro-drop) languages: thus, topic pro-drop languages allow referential pronouns to be omitted, or be phonologically null. (In contrast, languages that lack topic pro-drop as a mechanism would still require

900-422: Is crucially not a null dummy pronoun . Pro-drop is a problem when translating to a non-pro-drop language such as English, which requires the pronoun to be added, especially noticeable in machine translation . It can also contribute to transfer errors in language learning. An areal feature of some European languages is that pronoun dropping is not, or seldom, possible (see Standard Average European ); this

960-516: Is employed among equals but not for very close people (couples or family) or to inferiors (children, animals etc.), where the pronoun tú would normally be used. Ladino uses vos as well but uses it as in Old Spanish (see above), that is, as a respectful form of address, equivalent to how usted is used elsewhere. In fact, Ladino does not use usted at all because vos implies the same respect that it once had in Old Spanish. In Ladino, tú

1020-603: Is fairly common. In Anglophone countries, that would be roughly analogous to asking if it is acceptable to call someone by their first name. In the plural, in Spain (other than the Canary Islands and parts of western Andalusia ), the usage of the familiar vosotros/vosotras and the polite ustedes is identical to the usage of tú/usted . In the Canary Islands as well as those parts of western Andalusia, in addition to all of Spanish America, vosotros

1080-406: Is fundamental to interpersonal communication. The usage of Tú/Vos and Usted depends on a number of factors, such as the number of people with whom the speaker is talking, the formality or informality of the relationship between the speaker and the other person, the age difference between them, and the regional variation of Spanish. Using the usted form to address someone implies that

1140-484: Is generally translated as just Creo unless the speaker contrasts their views with those of someone else or places emphasis on the fact that their views are their own and not somebody else's. Third-person masculine and feminine pronouns ( él , ella , ellos , and ellas ) can refer to grammatically masculine and feminine objects as well as people, but their explicit use as subjects is somewhat uncommon, and restricted to people. The third-person neuter singular pronoun ello

1200-523: Is likewise rarely used as an explicit subject in everyday language, although such usage is found in formal and literary contexts. Quite unusually among European languages, the first- and second-person plural subject pronouns ( nosotros/nosotras and vosotros/vosotras , respectively) inflect for gender: nosotros and vosotros are used to refer to groups of men (as well as mixed-gender groups), while nosotras and vosotras are used exclusively to refer to groups of women. Like French and other languages with

1260-439: Is made clear in a footnote: "The principle suggested is fairly general, but does not apply to such languages as Japanese in which pronouns can be missing much more freely." (Chomsky 1981:284, fn 47). The term pro-drop is also used in other frameworks in generative grammar , such as in lexical functional grammar (LFG), but in a more general sense: "Pro-drop is a widespread linguistic phenomenon in which, under certain conditions,

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1320-732: Is not the native language of most of the people. English holds official status in numerous countries within the Commonwealth of Nations . English is the primary natively spoken language in several countries and territories. Five of the largest of these are sometimes described as the " core Anglosphere "; they are the United Kingdom , the United States , Australia , Canada , and New Zealand . The term "Anglosphere" can sometimes be extended to include other countries and territories where English or an English Creole language

1380-433: Is not used except in very formal contexts such as oratory, and ustedes is the familiar as well as the polite plural. The distinction extends to other types of pronouns and modifiers: when using usted one must also use the third-person object pronouns and possessive adjectives. " Tu casa " ( tú with an (acute) accent is the subject pronoun, tu with no accent is a possessive adjective) means "your house" in

1440-547: Is roughly analogous to the English phrase "yours truly". Non-binary people in Spanish-speaking countries use many personal pronouns in place of gendered ones. It is common to substitute the "a" in ella/la, ellas/las, suya/suyas, nosotras, and vosotras with the letters " e ", "i", "u", or "oa", and in writing with "x", "*", "@", "æ", and "_". Other gender-neutral forms include il/li, ól/ol, and xelle/le. Pro-drop A pro-drop language (from "pronoun-dropping")

1500-410: Is significant regional variation in the use of personal pronouns, especially second-person pronouns. All the personal pronouns used in Spanish are outlined in the table below. Ladino , historically spoken by Sephardic Jews , employs some personal pronouns that have fallen out of use in Spanish. Usted may be abbreviated as Ud. or Vd . A disused equivalent of vuestro(s) / vuestra(s)

1560-525: Is so widely spoken, it has often been called a " world language ", the lingua franca of the modern era, and while it is not an official language in most countries, it is currently the language most often taught as a foreign language . It is, by international treaty, the official language for aeronautical and maritime communications. English is one of the official languages of the United Nations and many other international organizations, including

1620-1108: Is studied most often in the European Union , and the perception of the usefulness of foreign languages among Europeans is 67% in favour of English, ahead of 17% for German and 16% for French (as of 2012 ). In some of the non–English-speaking EU countries, the following percentages of adults claimed to be able to converse in English in 2012: 90% in the Netherlands; 89% in Malta; 86% in Sweden and Denmark; 73% in Cyprus, Croatia, and Austria; 70% in Finland; and over 50% in Greece, Belgium, Luxembourg, Slovenia, and Germany. In 2012, excluding native speakers, 38% of Europeans consider that they can speak English. Books, magazines, and newspapers written in English are available in many countries around

1680-497: Is the case for English , French , German , and Emilian dialect, among others. In contrast, Japanese , Mandarin Chinese , Slavic languages , Finno-Ugric languages , Assyrian Neo-Aramaic , Kra-Dai languages , Italian , Spanish , and Portuguese exhibit frequent pro-drop features. Some languages, such as Greek and Hindi also exhibit pro-drop in any argument. In Noam Chomsky 's "Lectures on Government and Binding",

1740-467: Is the stressed form. Clitics cannot function independently and must attach to a host (either a verb or preposition). Clitic 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 (or related word) itself) most often appear with positive imperatives and may appear with infinitives and gerunds as well. In all compound infinitives that make use of

1800-475: Is used towards anyone in an informal manner. In the local Spanish-based creole , Chavacano , the use of vos coexists alongside tú and usted depending on level of intimacy, commonality, and formality. The variant vusted / vustedes is mostly a regionalism in some countries in South America. It is common in isolated areas of Colombia and Venezuela . Other speakers consider it archaic because it

1860-434: 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 . Simple non-emphatic clitic doubling is most often found with dative clitics, although it is occasionally found with accusative clitics as well. In a wide area in central Spain, including Madrid , there exists the practice of leísmo ; which is, using the indirect object pronoun le for

Spanish personal pronouns - Misplaced Pages Continue

1920-572: Is widely used by Spaniards except in some southwestern regions and in most of the Canary Islands , where its use is rare. Among the former colonies of the Spanish Empire , the use of vosotros and its normal conjugations is also retained in the Philippines and Equatorial Guinea . In the Ladino of Sephardic Jews, the only second person plural is vozotros (i.e. there is no ustedes , as in standard Spanish). Throughout Latin America,

1980-883: The International Olympic Committee . It is also one of two co-official languages for astronauts (besides the Russian language) serving on board the International Space Station . The English language has a particular significance in the Commonwealth of Nations, which developed from the British Empire. English is the medium of inter-Commonwealth relations. The English language as used in the Commonwealth has sometimes been referred to as Commonwealth English , most often interchangeably with British English . English

2040-463: The T-V distinction , modern Spanish has a distinction in its second-person pronouns that has no equivalent in modern English. The most basic is the difference between tú ( vos in areas with voseo ) and usted : tú or vos is the "familiar" form, and usted , derived from the third-person form "your grace" ( vuestra merced ), is the "polite" form. The appropriate usage of those forms

2100-458: The largest language by number of speakers , the third largest language by number of native speakers and the most widespread language geographically. The countries in which English is the native language of most people are sometimes termed the Anglosphere . Speakers of English are called Anglophones . Early Medieval England was the birthplace of the English language; the modern form of

2160-484: The past participle , enclitics attach to the uninflected auxiliary verb and not the past participle(s) itself. In Spanish, two (and rarely three) clitic pronouns can be used with a single verb, generally one accusative and one dative. They follow a specific order based primarily on person: Thus: The full and pronominal form of a reduplicated direct object must agree in gender and number: When an accusative third-person non-reflexive pronoun ( lo , la , los , or las )

2220-676: The dust of my rugged mountains. Forms based on vosotros and vos are used in many Spanish-based creole languages . In Chavacano , spoken in the Philippines, vo is used alongside tu as a singular second-person pronoun in Zamboangueño, Caviteño, and Ternateño. In Zamboangueño, evos is also used. For the plural, Zamboangueño has vosotros while Caviteño has vusos . Papiamento , spoken in Aruba , Bonaire , and Curaçao , maintains boso (singular) and bosonan (plural). Since it

2280-402: The familiar singular: the owner of the house is one person, and it is a person with whom one has the closer relationship the tú form implies. In contrast, su casa can mean "his/her/their house, but it can also mean "your house" in the polite singular: the owner of the house is someone with whom one has the more distant or formal relationship implied by the use of usted . Similarly,

2340-434: The first and second persons, the normal object pronouns are used. Thus, the reflexive forms are: The reflexive pronoun is used with pronominal verbs, also known as reflexive verbs. These verbs require the use of the reflexive pronoun, appropriate to the subject. Some transitive verbs can take on a reflexive meaning, such as lavar (to wash) and lavarse (to wash oneself). Other verbs have reflexive forms which do not take on

2400-418: The following examples from Japanese: この Kono This ケーキ kēki cake は wa TOP 美味しい。 oishii. tasty- PRS 誰 Dare Who が Anglophone The English-speaking world comprises the 88 countries and territories in which English is an official, administrative, or cultural language. In the early 2000s, between one and two billion people spoke English, making it

2460-534: The language has been spread around the world since the 17th century, first by the worldwide influence of England and later the United Kingdom, and then by that of the United States . Through all types of printed and electronic media of these countries, English has become the leading language of international discourse and the lingua franca in many regions and professional fields, such as science , navigation and law . The United States and India have

Spanish personal pronouns - Misplaced Pages Continue

2520-536: The language is still viewed primarily as a foreign tongue and does not serve an important cultural role in society. English is an official language ( de facto or de jure ) of the following countries and territories. Although not official, English is also an important language in some former colonies and protectorates of the British Empire where it is used as an administrative language , namely Brunei , Malaysia , and Sri Lanka . Because English

2580-484: The large Spanish colonial cities, like Mexico City, Cartagena (Colombia), and Lima. In some areas, like the River Plate region, vos has become the only generic form of address for the second-person singular, that is, it has the same meaning that tú has elsewhere (informal and intimate). In other areas, like Chile, it persists as a fairly stigmatized form alongside the more prestigious tú . In some other areas, it

2640-418: The masculine gender and una servidora , esta servidora , servidora for the feminine are nouns meaning "servant" but used with the singular third-person verb as a polite, distancing, or humorous first-person pronoun, e.g. ¿Quién es el siguiente? - ¡Servidor! , 'Who is next? - [humbly] Me!', Servidora está harta de usted. , '[Disdainfully] I am fed up with you.' In this sense, it

2700-478: The mechanism by which overt pronouns are more "useful" in English than in Japanese is obscure, and there are exceptions to this observation, it still seems to have considerable descriptive validity. As Huang puts it, "Pro-drop is licensed to occur either where a language has full agreement, or where a language has no agreement, but not where a language has impoverished partial agreement." In pro-drop languages with

2760-496: The most total English speakers, with 306 million and 129 million, respectively. These are followed by Pakistan (104 million), the United Kingdom (68 million), and Nigeria (60 million). As of 2022, there were about 400 million native speakers of English. Including people who speak English as a second language , estimates of the total number of Anglophones vary from 1.5 billion to 2 billion. David Crystal calculated in 2003 that non-native speakers outnumbered native speakers by

2820-515: The notion "that vosotros is not used in Spanish America is one of the great myths of Spanish language instruction, at least in the U.S.", citing as an example the following quote, which employs the genitive (possessive) form of the word, vuestro : Más de un batallón de los vuestros, invasor rubio, habrá mordido el polvo de mis agrestes montañas. transl.  More than a battalion of yours, blonde invader, will have bitten

2880-416: The noun they modify (e.g. "I did it myself"), Spanish intensifiers must come immediately after the noun they modify. Object pronouns are personal pronouns that take the function of an object in the sentence. Spanish object pronouns may be both clitic and non-clitic; the clitic form is the unstressed form, and the non-clitic form, which is formed with the preposition a ("to") and the prepositional case,

2940-498: The noun to place emphasis on the fact of possession. The pronoun vos was once used as a respectful form of address, semantically equivalent to modern usted . It used the same conjugations as modern vosotros (see below) and also the oblique form os and the possessive vuestro/-a/-os/-as . However, unlike vosotros , which always refers to more than one person, vos was usually singular in meaning. The modern voseo of several countries (see below) derives from vos but has become

3000-423: The object pronoun where Standard Spanish would use lo (masculine) or la (feminine) for the object pronoun. Genitive pronouns describe to whom something belongs or of whom (or sometimes what) something is a characteristic or property. They are analogous to English "mine", "yours", "his", "hers", etc., and unlike their English counterparts, they inflect for gender and number according to the thing possessed ( not

3060-403: The person addressed is a social superior, someone to whom respect is owed, or someone with whom one does not have a close relationship. In contrast, the use of tú or vos implies that the person addressed is an equal, a comrade , a friend, someone with whom one has a close relationship, or a child or other social inferior, including (traditionally) a maid or other household employee. Tú

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3120-429: The person addressed is being haughty. Spanish has a verb, tutear , meaning to use the familiar form tú to address a person. If speakers feel that the relationship with the conversant has evolved, sometimes only after a few minutes of conversation, to a point that a shift from usted to tú is desirable, they often confirm that by asking if it is acceptable: Nos tuteamos, ¿verdad? or ¿Te puedo tutear?

3180-526: The possessor itself) and are generally used with the definite article: After ser , however, the definite article is usually omitted: To avoid ambiguity in the meaning of suyo , it may be replaced by de + the appropriate pronoun: The neuter article lo can also be used with genitive pronouns to express the concept of "what is mine", "what is yours", "what is his", etc.: lo mío , lo tuyo , lo suyo , etc. Genitive pronouns are identical in form to long-form possessive adjectives , which may be placed after

3240-410: The pronoun.) These dropped pronouns can be inferred from previous discourse, from the context of the conversation, or generally shared knowledge. Among major languages, some which might be called topic pro-drop languages are Japanese , Korean , and Mandarin . Topic prominent languages like Korean, Mandarin and Japanese have structures which focus more on topics and comments as opposed to English,

3300-615: The second person plural pronoun ustedes is almost always used orally in both formal (singular usted ) and informal (singular tú/vos ) contexts. However, vosotros and its related forms are not unheard of in Latin America. The use of vosotros was more widespread in formal, educated speech in Hispanic America around the time of the Spanish American wars of independence . Even in modern times,

3360-567: The term is used for a cluster of properties of which " null subject " was one (for the occurrence of pro as a predicate rather than a subject in sentences with the copula see Moro 1997). Thus, a one-way correlation was suggested between inflectional agreement (AGR) and empty pronouns on the one hand and between no agreement and overt pronouns, on the other. In the classical version, languages which not only lack agreement morphology but also allow extensive dropping of pronouns—such as Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese—are not included, as

3420-475: The use of usted requires third-person object pronouns except in some Andalusian dialects . Te lavas means "you [familiar singular] wash yourself", but se lava can mean "you [polite singular] wash yourself" as well as "he/she/it washes himself/herself/itself"'. There are several impersonal pronouns in Spanish: The third person is the only person with a distinct reflexive pronoun: se . In

3480-475: The use of vosotros may still be found in oratory , legal documents, or other highly formal or archaic contexts. Spanish studies scholar Daniel Eisenberg  [ es ] has noted that because the "use of archaic Spanish can give an impression of authority and wisdom", Latin American Spanish speakers will sometimes use vosotros to achieve a specific rhetorical effect; he observed that

3540-462: The world; English is the most commonly used language in the sciences, with Science Citation Index reporting as early as 1997 that 95% of its articles were written in English, even though only half of them came from authors in English-speaking countries. In publishing, English literature predominates considerably, with 28% of all books published in the world [Leclerc 2011] and 30% of web content in 2011 (down from 50% in 2000). The increasing use of

3600-466: Was used with slaves, the forms that seemed disrespectful in the rest of America were common. Menda is the equivalent of I in Caló , where it is concords in first person singular. In Spanish slang such as Cheli , el menda ♂ / la menda ♀ can be used as an emphatic I , concording with a third person verb, but its use is receding. Un servidor , este servidor or simply servidor for

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