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Spanish verbs form one of the more complex areas of Spanish grammar. ... When the subject is the agent or doer of the action, the verb is in the active voice.
For other irregular verbs and their common patterns, see the article on Spanish irregular verbs. The tables include only the "simple" tenses (that is, those formed with a single word), and not the "compound" tenses (those formed with an auxiliary verb plus a non-finite form of the main verb), such as the progressive, perfect, and passive voice.
The formal second-person pronouns (usted, ustedes) take third-person verb forms. The second-person familiar plural is expressed in most of Spain with the pronoun vosotros and its characteristic verb forms (e.g., coméis 'you eat'), while in Latin American Spanish it merges with the formal second-person plural (e.g., ustedes comen).
The use of some transitive verbs denoting strictly reciprocal events may involve a conflation of agent and subject. In the sentence "John met Sylvia", for example, though both John and Sylvia would equally meet Dowty's definition of a Proto-Agent, the co-agent Sylvia is downgraded to patient because it is the direct object of the sentence. [3]
Spanish verbs are a complex area of Spanish grammar, with many combinations of tenses, aspects and moods (up to fifty conjugated forms per verb).Although conjugation rules are relatively straightforward, a large number of verbs are irregular.
Sometimes, English has a lexical distinction where other languages may use the distinction in grammatical aspect. For example, the English verbs "to know" (the state of knowing) and "to find out" (knowing viewed as a "completed action") correspond to the imperfect and perfect forms of the equivalent verbs in French and Spanish, savoir and saber ...
Some languages with verbal agreement can leave certain subjects implicit when the subject is fully determined by the verb form. In Spanish, for instance, subject pronouns do not need to be explicitly present, but in French, its close relative, they are obligatory. The Spanish equivalent to the French je suis (I am) can be simply soy (lit. "am
Spanish also features the T–V distinction, the pronoun that the speaker uses to address the interlocutor – formally or informally [c] – leading to the increasing number of verb forms. Most verbs have regular conjugation, which can be known from their infinitive form, which may end in -ar, -er, or -ir. [11] However, some are irregular ...