Re: Subject / Object / ?

>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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