Essential Grammar and Linguistic Concepts

Determinative Adjectives and Pronouns

Determinative Adjectives

Determinative adjectives accompany a noun, specifying its meaning and needing to match it in gender and number.

Classes of Determinative Adjectives

• Possessive: Indicate if the noun belongs to the speaker, the listener, or the person/thing being spoken about.
• Demonstrative: Place the noun in space, indicating remoteness or proximity relative to the speaker.
• Indefinite: Loosely indicate quantity.
• Numeral: Express either the amount (cardinal) or the order a noun holds in a series (ordinal).
• Interrogative: Used to ask a question about the noun.
• Exclamatory: Emphasize the quality or quantity of the noun.

Pronouns

Pronouns replace a noun or a set of words equivalent to a noun.

Personal Pronouns

Personal pronouns correspond to the first person (the speaker), the second person (the listener), or the third person (the person or thing spoken about).

Other Types of Pronouns

There are other kinds of pronouns, which often have the same form as their corresponding determinative adjectives:

• Numerals
• Possessives
• Demonstratives
• Interrogatives
• Indefinites
• Exclamatives

Distinguishing Adjectives and Pronouns

They are distinguished because:

• Determinative adjectives always accompany the noun.
• Pronouns replace the noun.

Understanding News

News is the story of something that happened recently and has public interest. Generally, a news story tells us:

• What happened
• Who did it
• When it happened
• Where it happened
• How it happened
• Why it happened

Connecting Words and Ideas

Prepositions

Prepositions are links that connect two words by subordinating one to the other. The first term can be a verb, a noun, or an adjective, and the second term, which depends on the previous one, is usually a noun or a pronoun.

Common Spanish Prepositions

The Spanish prepositions include: a, ante, bajo, con, contra, de, desde, durante, en, entre, hacia, hasta, mediante, para, por, según, sin, sobre, tras.

Prepositional Phrases

Prepositional phrases are two or more words that function as a preposition, such as: debajo de, en medio de, a pesar de, junto a.

Conjunctions

Conjunctions join two words of the same class or two sentences. Common conjunctions are: y, ni, o, pero, que.

Conjunctive Phrases

Conjunctive phrases are groups of words that perform the same function as a conjunction, for example: sin embargo, no obstante, porque.

Discourse Markers (Text Connectors)

Discourse markers or text connectors are words used to indicate the relationship between different ideas within a text. They can be conjunctions, conjunctive phrases, adverbs, or other linguistic elements.

The Art of Description

What is Description?

Description is the act of portraying something in words, painting a picture for the reader.

Types of Description

Objective Description

Objective description occurs if the author does not intend to convey any personal opinion or sensation.

Subjective Description

Subjective description occurs if the author wants to convey the sensations or feelings produced by what is being described.

Purpose and Characteristics

Description can sometimes serve informational purposes. In literary descriptions, impressions, sensations, and feelings that the author wants to create for the reader often dominate. In other descriptions, the purpose is to report accurately.

In descriptions, you often find:

• Many adjectives
• Verbs in the present or past indicative tense

Understanding Homophones

Homophones are words that are spelled differently but pronounced the same. Examples include: baca (roof rack) and vaca (cow), hola (hello) and ola (wave), onda (wave/ripple) and honda (deep/sling).