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In English grammar, the pluperfect (e.g. "had written") is now usually called the past perfect, since it combines past tense with perfect aspect. (The same term is sometimes used in relation to the grammar of other languages.) English also has a past perfect progressive (or past perfect continuous) form: "had been writing".
The primary stress of a Spanish word usually occurs in one of three positions: on the final syllable (oxytone, e.g. señor, ciudad), on the penultimate syllable (paroxytone, e.g. señora, nosotros), or on the antepenultimate syllable (proparoxytone, e.g. teléfono, sábado), but in very rare cases, it can come on the fourth- or even fifth-last syllable in compound words (see below).
The modern Spanish verb paradigm (conjugation) has 16 distinct complete [1] forms (tenses), i.e. sets of forms for each combination of tense, mood and aspect, plus one incomplete [2] tense (the imperative), as well as three non-temporal forms (the infinitive, gerund, and past participle). Two of the tenses, namely both subjunctive futures, are ...
Stress in these languages is usually truly lexical and must be memorized as part of the pronunciation of an individual word. In some languages, such as Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Lakota and, to some extent, Italian, stress is even represented in writing using diacritical marks, for example in the Spanish words célebre and celebré ...
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 (resulting in up to fifty conjugated forms per verb).
Moreover, Spanish has two semivowels as allophones, [j, w]; while Portuguese has four, two oral [i̯ ~ ɪ̯], [u̯ ~ ʊ̯] and two nasalized glides [j̃ ~ ɪ̯̃], [w̃ ~ ʊ̯̃] (non-syllabic near-close vowels, as those of most English speech, are allophones of the glides in the Brazilian dialects where near-closeds are used).
In Spanish, the so-called present or active participle (participio activo or participio de presente) of a verb is traditionally formed with one of the suffixes -ante, -ente or -iente, but modern grammar does not consider it a true participle, as such forms usually have the meaning of simple adjectives or nouns: e.g. amante "loving" or "lover ...
Dequeísmo is a phenomenon in Spanish grammar, considered "wrong" in prescriptive works. It is the practice of using de que instead of que as the complementizer introducing a verbal complement clause. It can be seen as the opposite of queísmo, which involves using que when de que is to be used. For example, Me dijo de que estaba cansado ("He ...