III.

Grammar

In its grammatical structure Spanish is generally in conformity with French, Italian, Portuguese, and the other Romance languages. A pronounced peculiarity of Spanish grammar, however, is the use of the preposition a (normally meaning “to”) as an untranslatable particle before the direct object of a verb if that object is a person; for example, veo a mi amigo (“I see [particle] my friend”). The four conjugations of Latin have been reduced in Spanish to three; furthermore, regular verbs of the Spanish second and third conjugations differ in only four forms, namely, the present infinitive, the first and second persons plural of the present indicative mood, and the second person plural of the imperative mood.

The subjunctive mood is much more widely used in Spanish than in most modern languages, having, besides the customary present and imperfect tenses, a second imperfect form derived from the Latin pluperfect indicative. Auxiliaries are used to form the compound tenses, as in the other Romance languages; for the perfect tenses, the auxiliary in Spanish is always a form of haber (“to have”), as in se ha lisonjeado, “he has flattered himself” (in French and Italian, in contrast, “to be” is used for the perfect of certain verbs). Spanish far exceeds most of the other Romance languages in its idiomatic use of reflexive verbs with special meanings. As in the other Romance tongues, the Spanish future and conditional indicative are really compounds formed by adding to the entire infinitive (used as a stem) the present and imperfect indicative endings, respectively, of haber. The Spanish neuter gender survives in a few instances: in the singular of the definite article lo, in the demonstrative words esto, eso, and aquello, and in the third-person objective pronoun lo. These neuter forms occur only in indefinite and general constructions (no lo hizo, “he didn't do it”) and in constructions in which the neuter article, accompanied by an adjective or adverb, forms abstract expressions; thus, lo bueno, “the good”, means “goodness”.