Spanish verbs


Spanish verbs form one of the more complex areas of Spanish grammar. Spanish is a relatively synthetic language with a moderate to high degree of inflection, which shows up mostly in Spanish conjugation.
As is typical of verbs in virtually all languages, Spanish verbs express an action or a state of being of a given subject, and like verbs in most Indo-European languages, Spanish verbs undergo inflection according to the following categories:
The modern Spanish verb paradigm has 16 distinct complete forms, i.e. sets of forms for each combination of tense, mood and aspect, plus one incomplete tense, as well as three non-temporal forms. Two of the tenses, namely both subjunctive futures, are now obsolete for most practical purposes.
The 16 "regular" forms include 8 simple tenses and 8 compound tenses. The compound tenses are formed with the auxiliary verb haber plus the past participle. Verbs can be used in other forms, such as the present progressive, but in grammar treatises they are not usually considered a part of the paradigm but rather periphrastic verbal constructions.

Verbal inflection

Spanish verbs are inflected to convey mood, tense, voice, and aspect, and to agree with person and number.

Person and number

Spanish verbs are conjugated in three persons, each having a singular and a plural form. In some varieties of Spanish, such as that of the Río de la Plata Region, a special form of the second person is used.
Spanish is a pro-drop language, meaning that subject pronouns are often omitted.

First person

The grammatical first person refers to the speaker. The first person plural refers to the speaker together with at least one other person.
  • soy: "I am"
  • somos: "We are"; the feminine form nosotras is used only when referring to a group that is composed entirely of females; otherwise, nosotros is used.

    Second person

The grammatical second person refers to the addressee, the receiver of the communication. Spanish has different pronouns for "you," depending on the relationship, familiar or formal, between speaker and addressee.
Singular forms
  • eres: "You are"; familiar singular; used when addressing someone who is of close affinity. It is also the form used to address a deity.
  • sos: "You are"; familiar singular; generally used in the same way as tú. Its use is restricted to some areas of Hispanic America. In some areas both tú and vos are used, formality levels and usage vary by country.
  • es: "You are"; formal singular; used when addressing a person respectfully, someone older, someone not known to the speaker, or someone of some social distance. Although it is a second-person pronoun, it uses third-person verb forms because it developed as a contraction of vuestra merced.
Plural forms
  • sois: "You are"; familiar plural; used when addressing people who are of close affinity. The feminine form vosotras is used only when addressing a group composed entirely of females; otherwise, vosotros is used. Used primarily in Spain but is also used in Equatorial Guinea and the Philippines, though it may appear in old, formal texts from other countries, such as the first initial line of the Argentine national anthem.
  • son: "You are"; formal plural where vosotros is used; both familiar and formal plural elsewhere. Where it is strictly formal, used when addressing people respectfully or addressing people of some social distance. Like usted, it uses third-person verb forms, for the same reasons.

    Third person

The grammatical third person refers to a person or thing other than the speaker or the addressee.
Singular forms
  • es: "He/it is"; used for a male person or a thing of masculine gender.
  • es: "She/it is"; used for a female person or a thing of feminine gender.
  • es: "It is"; used to refer to neuter nouns such as facts, ideas, situations, and sets of things; rarely used as an explicit subject.
Plural forms
  • son: "They are"; used for a group of people or things that includes at least one person or thing of masculine gender.
  • son: "They are"; used for a group of people or things that are all of feminine gender.

    Mood

Grammatical mood is one of a set of distinctive forms that are used to signal modality. In Spanish, every verb has forms in three moods. In older classifications there was a fourth mood, the conditional, that included the two conditional tenses, but nowadays those tenses are included in the indicative mood.
  • Indicative mood: The indicative mood, or evidential mood, is used for factual statements and positive beliefs. The Spanish conditional, although semantically expressing the dependency of one action or proposition on another, is generally considered indicative in mood, because, syntactically, it can appear in an independent clause.
  • Subjunctive mood: The subjunctive mood expresses an imagined, possible or desired action in the past, present, or future.
  • Imperative mood: The imperative mood expresses direct commands, requests, and prohibitions. In Spanish, using the imperative mood may sound blunt or even rude in some social settings, so it should be used with care.

    Tense

The tense of a verb indicates the time when the action occurs. It may be in the past, present, or future.

Impersonal or non-finite forms of the verb

forms refer to an action or state without indicating the time or person, and it is not conjugated for subject. Spanish has three non-finite forms: the infinitive, the gerund, and the past participle.

Infinitive

The infinitive is generally the form found in dictionaries. It corresponds to the English "base-form" or "dictionary form" and is usually indicated in English by "to _____". The ending of the infinitive is the basis of the names given in English to the three classes of Spanish verbs:
  • "-ar" verbs
  • "-er" verbs
  • "-ir" verbs

    Gerund

Although in English grammar the gerund refers to the -ing form of the verb used as a noun, in Spanish the term refers to a verb form that behaves more like an adverb. It is created by adding the following endings to the stem of the verb :
  • -ar verbs: -ando
  • -er verbs: -iendo
  • -ir verbs: -iendo
Certain verbs have irregular gerund forms:
  • Most -ir verbs undergo a predictable stem-vowel change: sentir → sintiendo, medir → midiendo, repetir → repitiendo, dormir → durmiendo, morir → muriendo. One -er verb also belongs to this group: poder → pudiendo.
  • In verbs whose stem ends in a vowel, the spelling of the -iendo ending is changed to -yendo: oír → oyendo, caer → cayendo, leer → leyendo, traer → trayendo, construir → construyendo, huir → huyendo. The "stemless" verb ir belongs to this group, with yendo.
  • For -er and -ir verbs whose stem ends in or, the -iendo ending is reduced to -endo: tañer → tañendo, bullir → bullendo.
The gerund has a variety of uses and can mean "doing/while doing/by doing/because of one's doing/through doing" and so on. It is also used to form progressive constructions, such as estoy haciendo. The gerund cannot be used as an adjective and generally has no corresponding adjectival forms. The now-mostly archaic present participle, which ended in -ante or -iente and formerly filled this function, in some cases survives as such an adjective, interesante ), but they are limited, and in cases where it does not, other constructions must be used to express the same ideas: where in English one would say "the crying baby", one would say in Spanish el bebé que llora.

Past participle

The past participle corresponds to the English -en or -ed form of the verb. It is created by adding the following endings to the verb stem:
  • -ar verbs: -ado
  • -er verbs: -ido
  • -ir verbs,: -ido
The past participle, ending invariably in -o, is used following the auxiliary verb haber to form the compound or perfect: he hablado ; habían hablado ; etc.
When the past participle is used as an adjective, it inflects for both gender and number – for example, una lengua hablada en España.

Voice

In grammar, the voice of a verb describes the relationship between the action that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its arguments. When the subject is the agent or doer of the action, the verb is in the active voice. When the subject is the patient, target, or undergoer of the action, it is said to be in the passive voice.

Verbal aspect

Verbal aspect marks whether an action is completed, a completed whole, or not yet completed.