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A note on Spanish conjugation with pronoun subjects

For those who are starting with Spanish conjugation, putting pronouns before declensions of verbs is no longer necessary, since the verbs themselves already show who or what does the action.

For example, the verb "digo" already means "I say", so no one needs to add the pronoun "yo" before "digo", except for emphasis.
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Original post by tinygirl96
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Original post by SlaveofAll
For those who are starting with Spanish conjugation, putting pronouns before declensions of verbs is no longer necessary, since the verbs themselves already show who or what does the action.

For example, the verb "digo" already means "I say", so no one needs to add the pronoun "yo" before "digo", except for emphasis.


Yes, Spanish is a prime example of a pro-drop language (it can drop the pronoun). However, be aware that simply having different conjugations for verbs doesn’t make a language pro-drop. For instance, French also has distinct verb conjugations for each subject and it is not a pro-drop language.

I’m no linguist nor have I researched this but I suspect that the reason French isn’t is that while the verb conjugations are different in written form, most of them sound the same because the French don’t pronounce half of each word. So with the verb manger, the conjugations mange, manges and mangent are all pronounced in identical fashion. Therefore the pronoun is always needed to clarify who is performing the action.

It’s different in Spanish because we don’t delete half the word in speech, everything is pronounced precisely how it’s written and so there is no ambiguity in 99% of cases regarding who the subject is, which allows Spanish to be a pro-drop language.
(edited 2 years ago)

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