Essential Spanish Grammar and Syntax Principles

English25 Mar 20262.92 KB

Verbs

Verbs are a variable word class characterized by number, tense, mood, voice, and appearance.

Syntax is the branch of grammar that studies the structure of sentences.

These are the two basic constituents of a sentence:

Subject: The entity that performs or is linked to the action of the verb.
Predicate: The part of the sentence that describes the action or state of the subject.

Indirect Object (CI): Indicates the person, animal, or thing that benefits or is harmed by the verb's action.
Circumstantial Complement (CC): Indicates circumstances such as time, manner, place, instrument, or company.
Agent Complement: Indicates the true subject or agent of the action in passive voice sentences.
Direct Object (CD): Played by nouns; it does not take a preposition unless it refers to people.
Supplement: A complement closely tied to the verb's meaning; it can be replaced by a demonstrative pronoun (e.g., 'talk about it').
Predicate Complement: A unique complement that modifies both the verb and another part of speech.

Variable words that agree in gender and number with the noun they qualify.

Syntagma: A linguistic sign formed by one or more words that performs a syntactic function.
Lexeme: The root of a word that carries its full dictionary meaning.
Morpheme: A unit that serves a purely grammatical function, such as indicating gender, number, or modifying the lexeme's meaning.

Text: A unit of communication that conforms to the issuer's communicative intention.
Coherence: A text is coherent if its statements are logically related, concern the same subject, are not contradictory, and advance information.
Cohesion: The linguistic mechanisms that ensure consistency:
- Lexical Cohesion: Achieved by repeating the same word or its derivatives.
- Semantic Cohesion: Achieved through the repetition of synonyms.
- Grammatical Cohesion: Achieved via articles with anaphoric value referring to previously mentioned nouns.