104 Hablemos de gramática: Estructura 4

Direct and indirect object pronouns together

After reviewing indirect and direct objects (and their pronouns) in previous sections, you are becoming increasingly comfortable with identifying the components of a sentence, e.g., the subject, the verb, the direct object and the indirect object.

Can you determine the subject, verb, direct and indirect objects of the following sentence? Remember: Who (the subject) does (the verb) what (the direct object) to/for whom (indirect object).

Kate manda un mensaje a su madre.

In addition, you are starting to produce your own sentences where you replace the objects with their respective pronouns. Recall that replacing an object with its pronoun is a very natural thing to do when the object has already been identified/introduced earlier in the context and their is no need to clarify, emphasize or disambiguate.

For example, consider the following question and answer:

Q: ¿Visitas a las vecinas? “Do you visit the neighbors”

A: Sí, las visito. “Yes, I visit them”

If someone had answered, Sí, visito a las vecinas “Yes, I visit the neighbors” it would be acceptable but it would sound a bit repetitive. If this process of avoiding redundancy or repetition sounds familiar, it is because we studied a similar process earlier on in the course. Subjects are also replaced by pronouns after they have been identified earlier in the context, in both Spanish AND English.

Note: Spanish goes a step further and often removes the subject pronoun altogether since it is not required and the verb ending itself contains a lot of this information.

Double object pronouns

In this section we will introduce how to construct double object pronouns, or sentences with both an indirect and a direct object pronoun. Before we do, let’s quickly review the pronouns in question:

Now let’s reconsider the previous example:

The direct object un mensaje “a message” is what is being sent. In other words, it is what the action of the verb is directly acting on. The indirect object su madre “her mom” receives the action of the verb indirectly (to whom/for whom in English).

In order to replace both of the objects in this sentence with their respective pronouns, we must follow these steps:

1. Identify the direct and indirect objects in the sentence. (DO>> mensaje / IO>> madre)
2. Determine the appropriate pronouns that should be used to replace them. (mensaje>> lo / madre>>le)
3. Place the pronouns before a conjugated verb or attached to the end of an infinitive in the order of indirect object pronoun 1st and direct object pronoun second.  (…le lo manda)

This leaves us with the revised sentence: Kate le lo manda.

Importantly, there is still one more crucial fourth step: The indirect object pronouns le and les change to se before the direct object pronouns lo, la, los and las.

After completing these four steps, we now have an accurate double object pronoun sentence:

In summary, using an object pronoun in place of the object is a very common practice when the object has already been identified and introduced earlier in the context. A common scenario is when an object is introduced in a question. The responder will likely replace the object with its pronoun in their response in order to not sound overly repetitive. When double object pronouns are used in the same sentence, we must keep a couple rules in mind such as the order in which they appear in the sentence and the fact that le sometimes changes to se.

Now let’s review this lesson with a couple of exercises: