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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.
NEG se CL puede can. 1SG pisar walk el the césped grass No se puede pisar el césped NEG CL can.1SG walk the grass "You cannot walk on the grass." Zagona also notes that, generally, oblique phrases do not allow for a double clitic, yet some verbs of motion are formed with double clitics: María María se CL fue went.away- 3SG María se fue María CL went.away-3SG "Maria went away ...
Spanish pronouns in some ways work quite differently from their English counterparts. Subject pronouns are often omitted, and object pronouns come in clitic and non-clitic forms. When used as clitics, object pronouns can appear as proclitics that come before the verb or as enclitics attached to the end of the verb in different linguistic ...
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"). The pronoun yo (I) in the explicit form yo soy is used only for emphasis or to clear ambiguity in complex texts.
Classical Latin, and the Vulgar Latin from which Romance languages such as Spanish are descended, had only two second-person pronouns – the singular tu and the plural vos. Starting in the early Middle Ages, however, languages such as French and Spanish began to attach honorary significance to these pronouns beyond literal number .
These include the grammatical custom (inherited from Latin) of using a grammatically masculine plural for a group containing at least one male; the use of the masculine definite article for infinitives (e.g. el amar, not la amar); and the permissibility of using Spanish male pronouns for female referents but not vice versa (e.g. el que includes ...
The pronouns yo, tú, vos, [1] él, nosotros, vosotros [2] and ellos are used to symbolise the three persons and two numbers. Note, however, that Spanish is a pro-drop language, and so it is the norm to omit subject pronouns when not needed for contrast or emphasis. The subject, if specified, can easily be something other than these pronouns.
In many languages, words other than nouns may take plural forms, these being used by way of grammatical agreement with plural nouns (or noun phrases). Such a word may in fact have a number of plural forms, to allow for simultaneous agreement within other categories such as case, person and gender, as well as marking of categories belonging to ...