Essential Spanish Grammar: Words, Phrases, and Sentences

1. The Word and Its Classifications

A word is a unit of language that is very easy to identify.

• Simple: Constituted by a single lexeme.
• Derivatives: Formed by one or more derivational morphemes added to a lexeme.
• Compound: Composed of two lexemes.
• Parasynthetic: A lexeme with both a prefix and a suffix.
• Lexical Family: A set of words that share the same lexeme.

2. Nouns and Adjectives

• Noun: A word that identifies and classifies beings and entities of reality.
• Adjective: A word that expresses qualities or properties of beings.

3. Variable Words and Determiners

• Variable Item: A word that supports gender and number variance.
• Pronouns: Words that replace nouns.
• Determiners: Words that accompany the substantive and clarify their meaning.

4. The Verb and Its Properties

• Verb: A variable word that indicates an action, process, or state.
• Tense: Indicates whether the verbal action is expressed as previous, simultaneous, or later.
• Aspect: Reports the speaker's perspective on the development of the verbal action.
• Mood: Reports on the attitude of the speaker toward the action of the verb.
• Conjugation: All the different forms a verb can take (1st, 2nd, and 3rd).
• Irregular Verbs: They have an alteration at the root in some forms.
• Defective Verbs: They are not used in all forms of conjugation (e.g., abolish, concern).
• Pronominal Verbs: Those that combine with an unstressed pronoun.

5. Invariable Words

• Adverb: A word that is morphologically unchanged.
• Prepositions: Invariable words that function to subordinate one unit to another.
• Conjunctions: Invariable words that function to coordinate and subordinate, providing grammatical meaning.

6. Phrases and Sentences

• Phrase: A group of words capable of performing a syntactic function.
• Recursion: A property of linguistic units where a phrase may exist inside another, and so on indefinitely.
• Sentence: A unit above the phrase whose syntactic structure is formed by a subject and a predicate.

7. Syntactic Functions

• Attribute: A function that only appears in the verbal phrase (predicate nominal).

8. Sentence Types

• Declarative: Express the sentence content as real and objective.
• Interrogative: Asks the listener for information (total/yes-no or partial).
• Exclamatory: Express feelings or emotions of the speaker.
• Imperative: Expresses a command, an order, or an indication for the listener to perform an action.
• Optative: Expresses wishes of the speaker.
• Dubitative: Expresses something as dubious or possible.