Pronouns Attached to Prepositions

In the lesson titled The Gender of Spanish Words you were introduced to learning Spanish grammar. In that lesson you learned about the Spanish Subject Pronouns. A Subject Pronoun is a pronoun that can take the place of the subject of a sentence (for example: father, teacher, Sally, Mary and John, and Stephen and I). Generally, that subject is a person or group of people. However, there are times when a pronoun is joined to a preposition. In other words, the pronoun acts as though it is the object of the prepositions. Let’s look at this more closely.

During your English classes you learned that a pronoun is a word that we use to replace the name of a person or thing. That person or thing is the “subject” of a sentence. For example, “John is my brother.” “John” is the subject of the sentence. Now, which pronoun can be used to replace “John”? In English, that pronoun is “he”. The sentence can, therefore, be rewritten to read, “He is my brother.” “He” is the subject pronoun.

Referring back to the prior lesson, the English subject pronouns include: I, you, he, she, we and they in English. In Spanish they are: yo, [Audio: 1] tú, [Audio: 2] usted, [Audio: 3] él, [Audio: 4] ella, [Audio: 5] nosotros, [Audio: 6] nosotras, [Audio: 7] vosotros, [Audio: 8] vosotras, [Audio: 9] ustedes, [Audio: 10] ellos [Audio: 11] and ellas [Audio: 12]. Looking at the above sentence, in Spanish “he” is “él” so the sentence would then read, “Él is my brother.” In this case, “él” is the subject pronoun.>/p>

Now let’s look at the sentence, “He gave the book to me.” In this sentence there is a preposition. The preposition is “to”. We will learn more about Spanish prepositions in later lessons but for now, let’s see how pronouns work when they are attached to prepositions.

Which pronoun in the above sentence is attached to the preposition “to”? It is the pronoun “me”. When the pronoun “me” is attached to a preposition, it becomes “mí” [Audio: 13]. (Note that its pronunciation sounds like “mē” with a long “e”.) Therefore, the above sentence would then read, “He gave the book to mí.” Notice that there is an accent mark about the “i” in this word.

Another thing that you learned about Spanish pronouns is that there are five different ways to say “you”. There is the singular “familiar” or “tú”, there is the singular “formal” or “usted”, there is the “masculine plural familiar” or “vosotros”, there is the “feminine plural familiar” or “vosotras” and, finally, there is the plural “formal” or “ustedes”. When these pronouns are attached to a preposition, there is no change in how the Spanish pronouns are written or spoke except for the singular “familiar” form. When this pronoun is attached to a preposition it becomes “ti” [Audio: 14]. (This is pronounced as “tea”.)

Let’s look at the following sentence that reads: “Mother received the gift from father.” Now let’s replace “father” with the singular familiar pronoun “you” so that the sentence now reads: “Mother received the gift from you.” The preposition in the sentence is “from” and the object of that proposition is “you”. Since the object of the preposition is “you” (singular familiar), the sentence, substituting in the Spanish pronoun, would then read: “Mother received the gift from ti.”

To see the Subject Pronoun and the pronoun when it is attached to a preposition side-by-side, they will look as follows:

There are always exceptions to the rule and this holds true for the Spanish pronouns that are attached to prepositions. In this case, the English preposition we will look at is “with”. In Spanish, the preposition for “with” is “con” [Audio: 15] Rather than say “with me” as “con mí” the words are combined together to make the Spanish word “conmigo” [Audio: 16]. So if you were to say, “Will you go with me?”, in Spanish you would say, “Will you go conmigo?” rather than “Will you go with con mí?”. Notice that when the words are combined, the accent mark above the “i” is dropped.

The other exception is when you say “with you” (singular familiar). Rather than say, “con ti” you would say “contigo” [Audio: 17]. Therefore if the sentence were “I will go with you.”, in Spanish it would be said as “I will go contigo.”

One final thing to understand is that when the pronoun that is attached to a preposition is a thing rather than a person, either “él or “ella” is used in its place. The gender of the “thing” is what will determine which Spanish pronoun should be used. For example: “They bought furniture for the house.” The preposition in this sentence is “for” and the object of that preposition is “the house”. Therefore, you then need to determine what word can be used to replace “the house”? That would be “it”. The sentence would then read, “They bought furniture for it.” In your last lesson you learned that the Spanish word for “house” is “casa” [Audio: 18]. You also learned that it is a “feminine” word. Therefore, this sentence using the Spanish pronoun for “it” would read, “They bought furniture for ella.”

It takes a little while to become comfortable with pronounces attached to prepositions but the more that you study and use them, the easier it will become to you. So, let’s now take the time to see what you can remember about pronouns.

Task

Practice saying the following:

• Give that to me.
• He gave that to you. [Singular familiar]
• He gave that to you. [Singular formal]
• Give that to him.
• Give that to her.
• Give that to us.
• He gave that to you. [Plural Masculine Familiar]
• He gave that to you. [Plural Feminine Familiar]
• He gave that to you. [Plural formal]
• Give that to them. [All girls]
• Give that to them. [All boys]
• Come with me.

The task, however, is to replace the object of each of the above prepositions with their correct Spanish pronoun. Repeat these sentences as many times as it takes until you can quickly substitute the Spanish pronoun for the pronoun attached to the preposition.

Quiz