Hello students, my name is Kendra Dickinson and I am a graduate student in the Hispanic Linguistics program in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. I study how Spanish and Portuguese vary according to linguistic and social factors. In this video, we are going to learn about pronouns and their syntactic functions. To begin, let's explore two different situations. In this first image we have a man and a dog and we can describe the activity in the image as follows. We can say, "The dog bites the man." In another situation again we have a man and a dog but the activity is different. We can describe this image as follows: "The man bites the dog." It's a little strange, but it could happen. So we have these two sentences that represent different situations. In the first sentence, "dog" is a noun and in the second sentence "dog" is a noun too. Interesting! In both sentences the word "man" is also a noun. So that leaves us with the question: If these sentences have the same words, with the same lexical categories (nouns), why do they have different meanings? Interesting! Let's say that these sentences have different meanings because the syntactic functions of the words are different in the two sentences. But what is a syntactic function? Syntactic function is the role of a word in a sentence. For example, in the first sentence "The dog bites the man," "the dog" is the subject of the sentence. In the second sentence, "The man bites the dog," "the dog" is the direct object. In the first sentence, however, "the man" is the direct object, but in the second sentence, "the man" is the subject. So the main syntactic functions in Spanish and in the languages of the world are: the subject, the direct object, and the indirect object. And now we are going to explore the direct object and the indirect object. Let's start with the direct object. We have two possible definitions for the direct object. First we can say that the direct object is the object on which the meaning of the verb is realized or directed. Let's see an example: "Ana has a dog." The action or activity of "having" is performed on the dog. Another example: "Patricia believes in science." Patricia's belief , her belief, is based on science. Another definition is the following. The direct object is the object that receives the direct action of the verb. An example: "Clara did her homework." Clara did her homework, performing the action of doing on the task. "I read novels." I do the activity of reading about the novels, the novels receive my action of reading. In general, the direct object is the answer to the questions what or who? Let's see an example: "Ana has a dog." "Ana has what?" "A dog" is the answer. And "I read the book." "I read what?" "The book." "Susana saw Lía yesterday." "Susana saw whom?" "Lía." The answer to those questions is always the direct object. In Spanish, we also have direct object pronouns. And we are going to see that only the third person pronouns lo/la/los/las have gender. The other pronouns do not have gender. We are also going to see that the first person and second person pronouns are expressed as pronouns. However, in the third person, you can use pronouns or nouns. Let's see examples of that. As for the first group that is expressed as a pronoun, we have some examples. "Melissa called me on the phone," "me" being the pronoun. "I saw you at the Ohio Union ," second person singular. And finally, "Sebastian loves us." His action of loving is performed on us. Okay, now as for third-person pronouns, we have options. They can appear as pronouns or nouns. An example would be "I read the book." You could also use a pronoun like this: "I read it." And both of these options are grammatical and acceptable. Another example: "Susana sang the song." You could also say "Susana sang it," and both options are reasonable and grammatical. We also need to look at the position of the direct object pronouns in the sentence. When I have a sentence like this, "I read the book," if I want to use a pronoun I have to transform the sentence like this: "I read it." So let's say that when there is only one conjugated verb in the sentence, the direct object pronoun always comes before the verb. In other cases, for example, "I want to read the book," we have options. You could say "I want to read it" or "I want to read it." These two options are possible. So when there is an infinitive verb, you can place the direct object pronoun before the conjugated verb or add it to the infinitive verb. Also, when we have a command, we have options. For example, "Sing the song now." You could say "Sing it now." So in this case, we are going to add the direct object pronoun to the verb in the imperative, to the command. So when we have a command, we add the direct object pronoun to the verb, at the end of the verb, and we are going to add an accent on the stem of the verb. In this case, we place the accent on the "a," in "sing it." Now, let's look at the indirect object. We can say that the indirect object indicates to or for whom the action of the verb is. For example, "Ana gave a book to Julián." "Paloma bought me the dinner" (for me). We also have indirect object pronouns and we're going to see that they don't have gender. Good. In general, the direct object is the answer to the question "To whom?" For example, "Ana gave a book to Julián." "Ana gave a book to whom?" "To Julián." "Paloma bought me dinner." "Paloma bought dinner for whom?" "To me" (me). We're also going to look at object order, so when we have a direct object and an indirect object in the same sentence with only one verb, both pronouns come before the verb and the indirect object pronoun comes first. For example, in the following sentence, "Susana tells me many stories," if we transform "many stories" into a pronoun, it results in the following sentence: "Susana tells me (indirect object) them ( indirect object)." "Susana tells me them." But, what happens when we have a direct object pronoun next to an indirect object pronoun that begins with "l"? Lo/la/los/las next to le or les. Le or les becomes "se". So in this case, "Susana le cuenta muchas historias" becomes "Susana le las cuenta," but this isn't possible so we have to change the "le" to a "se": "Susana se las cuenta." And so we have a grammatical sentence in Spanish. Okay, one more comment about object placement. If I have a sentence like this, "I'm going to give Maria a gift," I have several options. I can say "I'm going to give it to her" or "I'm going to give it to him." So when you add the two object pronouns to the verb, you have to add an orthographic accent on the root of the word to keep the stress on the same syllable as in the original word. So it's always going to be part of the ending '-ar', '-er', or '-ir', or '-ando', '-iendo' of the verb etcetera. For example, "I want to give it to him" or "She is telling you." In conclusion, the functions in tactics indicate the role of words within sentences and they are useful because they can help us understand and analyze more complex sentences in Spanish. And very importantly, they help us understand the difference between situations like "The dog bites the man" and "The man bites the dog." Thank you very much and good luck with pronouns and syntactic functions.