Spanish object pronouns


Spanish object pronouns are Spanish personal pronouns that take the function of an object in a sentence. They may be analyzed as clitics which cannot function independently, but take the conjugated form of the Spanish verb. Object pronouns are generally proclitic, i.e. they appear before the verb of which they are the object; enclitic pronouns appear with positive imperatives, infinitives, and gerunds.
In Spanish, up to two clitic pronouns can be used with a single verb, generally one accusative and one dative. They follow a specific order based primarily on person. When an accusative third-person non-reflexive pronoun is used with a dative pronoun that is understood to also be third-person non-reflexive. Simple non-emphatic clitic doubling is most often found with dative clitics, although it is occasionally found with accusative clitics as well, particularly in case of topicalization. In many dialects in Central Spain, including that of Madrid, there exists one of the variants of leísmo, which is using the indirect object pronoun le for the object pronoun where most other dialects would use lo or la for the object pronoun.

History

As the history of the Spanish language saw the shedding of Latin declensions, only the subject and prepositional object survived as independent personal pronouns in Spanish: the rest became clitics. These clitics may be proclitic or enclitic, or doubled for emphasis. In modern Spanish, the placement of clitic pronouns is determined morphologically by the form of the verb. Clitics precede most conjugated verbs but come after infinitives, gerunds, and positive imperatives. For example: me vio but verme, viéndome, ¡véame! Exceptions exist for certain idiomatic expressions, like "once upon a time".
CaseLatinSpanish
1st sg.
EGŌ
MIHI
MĒ
MĒCUM
yo
mí
me
conmigo
1st pl.NŌS
nosotros, nosotras
nos
2nd sg.
TŪ
TIBI
TĒ
TĒCUM
tú
ti
te
contigo
2nd pl.VŌS
vosotros, vosotras
os
3rd sg.
ILLE, ILLA, ILLUD
ILLĪ
ILLUM, ILLAM, ILLUD
él/ella/ello
le
lo/la
3rd pl.
ILLĪ, ILLAE, ILLA
ĬLLĪS
ILLŌS, ILLĀS, ILLA

ellos/ellas
les
los/las
3rd refl.
SIBI
SĒ/SĒSĒ
SĒCUM
sí
se
consigo

Old Spanish

Unstressed pronouns in Old Spanish were governed by rules different from those in modern Spanish. The old rules were more determined by syntax than by morphology: the pronoun followed the verb, except when the verb was preceded by a stressed word, such as a noun, adverb, or stressed pronoun.
For example, from Cantar de Mio Cid:
If the first stressed word of a clause was in the future or conditional tense, or if it was a compound verb made up of haber + a participle, then any unstressed pronoun was placed between the two elements of the compound verb.
Before the 15th century, clitics never appeared in the initial position; not even after a coordinating conjunction or a caesura. They could, however, precede a conjugated verb if there was a negative or adverbial marker. For example:
The same rule applied to gerunds, infinitives, and imperatives. The forms of the future and the conditional functioned like any other verb conjugated with respect to the clitics. But a clitic following a future or conditional was usually placed between the infinitive root and the inflection. For example:
By the 15th century, Early Modern Spanish had developed "proclisis", in which an object's agreement markers come before the verb. According to Andrés Enrique-Arias, this shift helped speed up language processing of complex morphological material in the verb's inflection.
This proclisis was a syntactic movement away from the idea that an object must follow the verb. For example, in these two sentences with the same meaning:
  1. María quiere comprarlo = "Maria wants to buy it."
  2. María lo quiere comprar = "Maria wants to buy it."
"Lo" is the object of "comprar" in the first example, but Spanish allows that clitic to appear in a preverbal position of a syntagma that it dominates strictly, as in the second example. This movement only happens in conjugated verbs. But a special case occurs for the imperative, where we see the postverbal position of the clitic
This is accounted for by a second syntactic movement wherein the verb "passes by" the clitic that has already "ascended".

Clitic substitution for the accusative

In most cases, one can identify the direct object of a Spanish sentence by substituting it for the accusative personal pronouns "lo", "la", "los", and "las".
But "lo" can also replace an attributive adjective, so it is necessary to identify first whether the sentence is predicative or attributive. An example of the attributive:
Traditional Spanish grade school language pedagogy teaches that one may identify the direct object by asking the question "What?". But this method is not always reliable, because the answer to the question "what" may be the subject:
This method also fails to analyze question sentences:
Object pronouns are generally proclitic, i.e. they appear before the verb of which they are the object. Thus:
In certain environments, however, enclitic pronouns may appear. Enclitization is generally only found with:
With positive imperatives, enclitization is always mandatory:
With infinitives and gerunds, enclitization is often, but not always, mandatory. With all bare infinitives, enclitization is mandatory:
In all compound infinitives that make use of the past participle, enclitics attach to the uninflected auxiliary verb and not the past participle itself:
In all compound infinitives that make use of the gerund, however, enclitics may attach to either the gerund itself or the main verb, including the rare cases when the gerund is used together with the past participle in a single infinitive:
With all bare gerunds, enclitization is once again mandatory. In all compound gerunds, enclitics attach to the same word as they would in the infinitive, and one has the same options with combinations of gerunds as with gerunds used in infinitives:
In constructions that make use of infinitives or gerunds as arguments of a conjugated verb, clitic pronouns may appear as proclitics before the verb or simply as enclitics attached to the infinitive or gerund itself. Similarly, in combinations of infinitives, enclitics may attach to any one of them:
Enclitics may be found in other environments in literary and archaic language, but such constructions are virtually absent from everyday speech.

Metaplasm

Enclitization is subject to the following metaplasmic rules:
In Spanish, up to two clitic pronouns can be used with a single verb, generally one accusative and one dative. Whether enclitic or proclitic, they cluster in the following order:
1234
sete
os		me
nos		lo, la,
los, las,
le, les

Thus:
Like Latin, Spanish makes use of double dative constructions, and thus up to two dative clitics can be used with a single verb. One must be the dative of benefit, and the other must refer to the direct recipient of the action itself. Context is generally sufficient to determine which is which:
Only one accusative clitic can be used with a single verb, however, and the same is true for any one type of dative clitic. When more than one accusative clitic or dative clitic of a specific type is used with a verb, therefore, the verb must be repeated for each clitic of the same case used:
Occasionally, however, with verbs such as dejar, which generally takes a direct object as well as a subsequent verb as a further grammatical argument, objects of two different verbs will appear together with only one of them and may thus appear to be objects of the same verb:
When an accusative third-person non-reflexive pronoun is used with a dative pronoun that is understood to also be third-person non-reflexive, the dative pronoun is replaced by se:
If se as such is the indirect object in similar constructions, however, it is often, though not always, disambiguated with a sí:

Non-emphatic

Simple non-emphatic clitic doubling is most often found with dative clitics. It is found with accusative clitics as well in cases of topicalization, and occasionally in other cases.
All personal non-clitic direct objects, as well as indirect objects, must be preceded by the preposition a. Therefore, to distinguish the non-clitic indirect objects, an appropriate dative clitic pronoun is often used. This is done even with non-personal things such as animals and inanimate objects. With all non-clitic dative personal pronouns, which take the form a + the prepositional case of the pronoun, and all non-pronominal indirect objects that come before the verb, in the active voice, clitic doubling is mandatory:
With non-pronominal indirect objects that come after the verb, however, clitic doubling is usually optional, though generally preferred in spoken language:
Nevertheless, with indirect objects that do not refer to the direct recipient of the action itself as well as the dative of inalienable possession, clitic doubling is most often mandatory:
With indefinite pronouns, however, clitic doubling is optional even with such dative constructions:
In the passive voice, where direct objects do not exist at all, simple non-emphatic dative clitic doubling is always optional, even with personal pronouns:
Dative clitic personal pronouns may be used without their non-clitic counterparts, however:
Simple non-emphatic clitic doubling with accusative clitics is much rarer. It is generally only found with:
Thus:
Accusative clitic doubling is also used in object-verb-subject word order to signal topicalization. The appropriate direct object pronoun is placed between the direct object and the verb, and thus in the sentence La carne la come el perro there is no confusion about which is the subject of the sentence.
Clitic doubling is also often necessary to modify clitic pronouns, whether dative or accusative. The non-clitic form of the accusative is usually identical to that of the dative, although non-clitic accusative pronouns cannot be used to refer to impersonal things such as animals and inanimate objects. With attributive adjectives, nouns, and the intensifier mismo, clitic doubling is mandatory, and the non-clitic form of the pronoun is used:
With predicative adjectives, however, clitic doubling is not necessary. Clitic pronouns may be directly modified by such adjectives, which must be placed immediately after the verb, gerund, or participle :
Clitic doubling is also the normal method of emphasizing clitic pronouns, whether accusative or dative. The clitic form is used in the normal way, and the non-clitic form is placed wherever one wishes to place emphasis:
Because non-clitic accusative pronouns cannot have impersonal antecedents, however, impersonal accusative clitics must be used with their antecedents instead:
Impersonal dative clitic pronouns, however, may be stressed as such:
Emphatic non-pronominal clitic doubling is also occasionally used to provide a degree of emphasis to the sentence as a whole:
The prepositional case is used with the majority of prepositions: a mí, contra ti, bajo él, etc., although several prepositions, such as entre and según, actually govern the nominative : entre yo y mi hermano, según tú, entre sí, etc., with the exception of entre nos, where the accusative may be used instead. With the preposition con, however, the comitative case is used instead. Yo, Tú, and se have distinct forms in the comitative: conmigo, contigo, and consigo, respectively, in which the preposition becomes one word with its object and thus must not be repeated by itself: conmigo by itself means "with me", and con conmigo is redundant. For all other pronouns, the comitative is identical to the prepositional and is used in the same way: con él, con nosotros, con ellos, etc.
As often with verbs used with multiple object pronouns of the same case, prepositions must be repeated for each pronoun they modify: