Morphology, Determiners, and Demonstratives in Spanish Grammar

Posted on Aug 14, 2024 in Computers

Morphology

Exploring ways and combinations of the components of a word. The internal components of a word are called morphemes or monemes, and are minimal units of meaning.

Morphemes are classified as follows:

1. Lexical Morphemes or Lexemes

This is the root of the word, the part that supports the central meaning, which is common to other words in its own household.

2. Tema (Morphological Root)

The morphological root and issue should be distinguished. The latter is the internal component of the word that remains after the removal of inflectional morphemes of gender, number, person, etc. The issue may coincide with the root or not.

3. Morpheme Desinenciales o Inflected

These are the endings of a word that indicates the grammatical meanings of gender, number, person, time, manner, appearance, etc. When the morpheme does not manifest itself with a foreign brand but opposes another or others, we are talking about the zero mark morpheme.

4. Derivational Morpheme Affixes

These go before or after a root and have no autonomy outside a word. They have varied significant contributions: quality, action, place, etc.

  • Prefixes: Before the root or lexeme
  • Suffixes: After the root or token
  • Interfix/Infix: Between the prefix and the root (e.g., in-s-anch-ar), or between the root and the suffix (e.g., cafe-c-ito)

The morphology, in conjunction with the components that attach to the root, can be:

1. Inflectional Morphology

Dealing with grammatical meanings of gender and number in nouns, adjectives, determiners, some pronouns, and the number, person, tense, mood, and aspect in verbs (also individual information is provided by the personal pronouns and possessive determiners). The marks of these meanings are called grammatical endings, and competitions including flexion (e.g., chant/sing).

2. Derivative Morphology and Composites

This not only studies the morphology of the endings of certain words, but also other segments that either precede the root, or follow it, but always go before the endings if any. These segments are the affixes.

On the other hand, there are words like “cart” which is composed of multiple roots. The study of these components of a word is also incumbent on the morphology.

Determinants

These have a limited and precise meaning of the noun they accompany.

Words that function as determinants are: articles, demonstrative determiners, possessives, numerals, permanents, etc.

  1. In general, the determinative does not support being combined with quantifiers.
  2. Save the determinative little, more, less, who can be quantified with adverbs, but these are suppressed, you do not need them.
  3. Anteposed to common nouns can make these, preverbal position can function as subjects.
  4. The names may be undetermined.
  5. Non-count nouns, if they go after the verb, they need not determine in their role as subject.

Article

  1. Operates in determining the noun.
  2. Always goes before the noun or noun word or phrase, never follows.
  3. Word always unstressed, i.e., relies on the first syllable of the word.
  4. Forms of the article: masculine, feminine, and neuter.
  5. The neutral article always accompanies adjectives. The articles may be worth pointing or deictic.
  6. Articles may be worth pointing or deictic (pointing or pointing to a reality designated by a concrete noun).
  7. Allow inserting other words as adverbs, adjectives, or prepositional groups.
  8. Never preceded by other determiners except all, all, all, all.
  9. Article may be followed by certain other numerals, cardinal, ordinal, and some open-ended as many, few, many, others.
  10. You can even combine several of them. You can also have a value emphatically, the article “the” “Sometimes the article has value possessive.
  11. Nouns that begin with “a” or “ha” tonic lead article “the” are plural instead on the article “the”.

Exceptions:

  • In front of the name of the letter “H” and “A” is always used “the”.
  • In front of the female names that begin with “a” is always used.
  • In front of the syllables that begin with “a” pattern and are feminine nouns.

Demonstratives

  1. Can be combined with possessives, numerals, and some vague at best, other, much… but always preceded. Only indefinite and its variants all precede the demonstration.
  2. Demonstratives are pointers elements because they are used to show people in space, time, or context.

Forms:

  • Este – esta – esto
  • Ese – esa – eso
  • Aquel – aquella – aquello
  • Estos – estas – estos
  • Esos – esas – esos
  • Aquellos – aquellas – aquellos
  • Esto is neutral (as there are no neutral nouns in Spanish, it replaces a preposition or an unknown object)
  • Tal and cual are determinative demonstratives when they precede the name with which match in number and present value pointing.

In front of nouns with “a” or “ha” the decisive tone always used female.