Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Tu casa tiene más cuartos que la suya = "Your house has more rooms than his/hers/yours/theirs" Estos libros son más interesantes que los vuestros = "These books are more interesting than yours [pl.]" Esas camisas son más pequeñas que las nuestras = "Those shirts are smaller than ours" After ser, however, the definite article is usually omitted:
Los niños con sus mochilas, quienes eran de Valencia, me impresionaron = "The children with their rucksacks, who were from Valencia, impressed me" (the use of quienes makes it clear that los niños is referred to; que could refer to the rucksacks, the children, or both, los cuales would refer to either the children or both, and las cuales ...
The first-person plural expressions nosotros, nosotras, tú y yo, or él y yo can be replaced by a noun phrase that includes the speaker (e.g. Los estudiantes tenemos hambre, 'We students are hungry'). The same comments hold for vosotros and ellos.
This means that speaking to a group of friends a Spaniard will use vosotros, while a Latin American Spanish speaker will use ustedes. Although ustedes is semantically a second-person form, it is treated grammatically as a third-person plural form because it originates from the term vuestras mercedes ('your [pl.] mercies,' sing. vuestra merced).
The use of usted and ustedes as a polite form of address is universal. However, there are variations in informal address. Ustedes replaces vosotros in part of Andalusia, the Canary Islands, and Latin America, except in the liturgical or poetic of styles. In some parts of Andalusia, the pronoun ustedes is used with the standard vosotros endings.
In those regions it replaces tuteo, i.e. the use of the pronoun tú and its verbal forms. Voseo can also be found in the context of using verb conjugations for vos with tú as the subject pronoun (verbal voseo). [1] In all regions with voseo, the corresponding unstressed object pronoun is te and the corresponding possessive is tu/tuyo. [2]
The plural imperative uses the ustedes form (i. e. the third person plural subjunctive, as corresponding to ellos). As for the subjunctive forms of vos verbs, most speakers use the classical vos conjugation, employing the vosotros form minus the i in the final diphthong. However, some prefer to use the tú subjunctive forms like in Paraguay.
In western Andalusia, ustedes is used in both contexts, but its verbs are conjugated in the second-person plural. Throughout the Americas and the Canaries, ustedes is used in all contexts and in the third person. In peninsular Spain, the use of usted/ustedes has been diminishing in recent decades and may disappear in the near future.