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Spanish has three kinds of demonstrative, whose use typically depends on the distance (physical or metaphorical) between the speaker and the described entity, or sometimes depends on the proximity to the three grammatical persons.
A definite article is an article that marks a definite noun phrase. Definite articles, such as the English the , are used to refer to a particular member of a group. It may be something that the speaker has already mentioned, or it may be otherwise something uniquely specified.
A definite article should be applied only if The is used in running text throughout university materials and if that usage has caught on elsewhere. Otherwise, do not use the definite article for universities. This guideline is a weak version of the most-common-name rule. Most universities do not have a definite article in their names.
Some loanwords enter Spanish in their plural forms but are reanalyzed as singular nouns (e.g., the Italian plurals el confeti 'confetti', el espagueti 'spaghetti', and el ravioli 'ravioli'). These words then follow the typical morphological rules of Spanish, essentially double marking the plural (e.g., los confetis, los espaguetis, and los ...
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.
Spanish has three forms for the singular definite article, el, masculine, la, feminine, and lo, neuter. The last is used with adjectives to form abstract nouns employed in a generic sense, and also to intensify the meaning of adjectives. In Portuguese, there is only o, masculine, and a, feminine.
Because the definite article is, along with más or menos, the superlative marker, the comparative is grammatically indistinguishable from the superlative when it is used; an additional qualifier phrase such as de los dos ("of the two") must therefore be used to indicate that the adjective is the comparative.
When writing about civilian ships, consider omitting common prefixes (e.g. "MS") from the article body, as italicizing the ship's name is often enough to identify it as a ship. Do not use the definite article the before a prefix or when introducing a ship for the first time; e.g., at the beginning of the lead section: