Eric Vogt - Spanish Pronouns Up Close

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My earnest thanks go to Garret Lemoi at McGraw-Hill for his patience as I prepared the final version of this bookand for so enthusiastically urging me to write it in the first place.

Likewise to Susan Moore for her diligence and sharp eye. As ever, I thank Lylje Klein for noticing every point that needed clarifying. I also thank my students who, during the 20072008 year, used earlier versions of these chapters and commented on their usefulness. No amount of thanks will ever be enough to tell my family how much Ive missed them while theyve waited for me on Bainbridge Island as Ive worked late nights in Seattle on this and other projects over the past two years.

Keeping track of pronouns in Spanish can be a bit frustrating for learners who do not know the names and jobs of these various players on the linguistic playing field as well as the rules of the grammar game that determine what job they perform. But take heart.

Pronouns, one of the parts of speech along with articles, verbs, nouns, adjectives, and so on, consist of a small number of little words with big jobs to do. They tell you who is doing something or who is giving what to whom, together with a host of other functions that we examine in this book. Pronouns are words that stand in for a noun. Nouns, you may recall, are names of people, places, things, or feelings (John, Susan, Chicago, table, bird, flower, love, anger,). He (l) is used instead of John, if John is the subject and the speaker and listener already have mentioned John by name. If John is the object, him (lo) stands in for John.

Although it is not always the case, in both English and Spanish the form of a pronoun often indicates its grammatical function: Lets indulge in a grammatical analogy using baseball to introduce you to the communicative richness of this small group of words known as pronouns. First, we will learn the names of three of the main types of pronouns and discover what their roles are on the language-learning playing field. (Of course, if the influences in your life happen to be British, you might have to make some quick mental adjustments to adapt the names of the positions on the field to cricket, but we Yanks trust that you will follow along just fine.) When a person is doing something, he or she is the actorthe active agent of an action. The action itself is expressed by a verb. In baseball, the most common actions are batting, catching, and throwing. When a batter steps up to the plate, bat in hand, awaiting the pitch, he awaits an action on the part of the pitcher on the mound.

From a grammatical point of view, at the opening of the game the pitcher is the subject when he throws the ball, because he is the one who throws it. The ball is what he throws; thus, grammatically speaking, the ball is the direct object. A direct object receives the action of a verb directly. In our analogy, the action, expressed by the verb, is the pitch. While the ball is hurling through the air at 90 miles per hour or more, the batter is waiting to become the next subjectthat is, the one who will hit the ball (or, if you happen to be a Chicago Cubs fan, the one who will strike at itand miss, of course). For a split secondthe moment the ball makes contact with the batthe batter can be seen grammatically as the indirect object, the one who receives the direct object of the ball.

However, the instant he swings the bat and hits (or strikes), he is the doer, or grammatical subject. In fact, he is the subject on the field at that moment. Everyone else is awaiting the result, as anxious fans will confirm. If he strikes, the catcher, in like manner, is the indirect object at the moment the ball contacts his glove, at which instant he becomes the subject of the verb to catch, and then, remaining the subject, he performs another action, throwing the ball back to the pitcher. Each of the three playerspitcher, batter, and catcherhas been either subject or indirect object in his own way during the quick action from first pitch, to hit or strike, to catch, and to throw the ball again. The names of those positions in fact denote the role of that player as doer (subject) of a particular action (verb).

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