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Re: Subject / Object / ?

From:Chris Bates <chris.maths_student@...>
Date:Monday, September 13, 2004, 11:18
>I was taught English to a conversational level without the use of the concepts >of subject and object. This works _precisely_ because it's a IE language >without cases - pretty much everything in this regard works like in Swedish*. I >do not know Spanish, but am tempted to assume it works the same for someone >coming from English. > >
The Spanish Pronoun system is similar in some ways but not in others. For a start there's a (at least) three way distinction, in place of the two of english: nom (yo, tu, usted, el....) , acc (me, te, le, la, ...) , and oblique (mi, ti, usted, el...). You could also count the indirect object and reflexive pronouns as more sets, but for most person/number combinations these are the same as the accusative (they differ in the third person). The most obvious difference is that the spanish accusative, indirect object, and reflexive pronouns are clitics (or prefixes... whatever they are, although they're written separately they can't be parted from their verb by other constituents of the phrase), unlike in English. Another difference is that Spanish is a prodrop language, and subject pronouns especially don't often appear since verb marking fulfills their role. The Spanish case system is unlike the English case system in some ways. Whereas in English we strictly separate subject and object (by word order rather than explicit marking, admittedly...) in Spanish there is no such distinction for nouns other than in nouns which refer to specific people (the so-called "personal a"; word order has a mainly pragmatic rather than grammatical function), so in some instances clauses can be ambiguous where there is no ambiguity in English. In practice the ambiguity rarely arises since the context usually makes it clear. In any case, I think you need to be acquainted with the ideas of subject, object and indirect object because you need to know what you're making the verb agree with (in many cases indirect object pronouns are compulsory even when the argument they refer to is present), especially since we have very little in the way of verbal agreement in English.

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Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>