This article discusses the forms and functions of the personal pronouns in Catalan grammar.
The "strong" pronouns (Catalan: pronoms forts) in Catalan have the following forms:
These forms are used as subject pronouns (with the exception of si), and also as disjunctive pronouns, for example, after a preposition.
The first person singular pronoun has a special form mi after most prepositions.
However, the form jo is used with some prepositions, for example, in segons jo ("according to me"), and in coordinated structures with another noun or pronoun: contra tu i jo ("against you and me").
The third person reflexive pronoun si (both singular and plural) cannot be used as a subject. It most commonly appears after a preposition, often reinforced by mateix:
The 2nd person polite pronouns are vostè (singular) and vostès (plural). They combine with 3rd person verbs.
The older form vós (with 2nd person plural verb agreement) can be found in some varieties of Catalan, and in contexts like administrative texts.
The 1st person majestic plural is expressed with the pronoun Nós (in place of nosaltres).
There exists as well an impersonal subject pronoun hom (unmarked for either gender or number), always used with 3rd person singular verbs, nowadays archaic and only used in writing:
The weak pronouns (Catalan: pronoms febles) are proforms that, as the name indicates, do not carry stress. All are monosyllabic clitics, and all must always appear immediately before or after a verb: they cannot be used on their own or attached to a different element of the sentence. The combination of the verb plus the weak pronoun or pronouns always has a single stressed vowel, that of the verb.
Weak pronouns in Catalan vary according to:
The form of a given pronoun is determined by its position with respect to the verb, and whether it is adjacent to a vowel or a consonant in the verb. There are four possible configurations:
Not all pronouns have four distinct forms. The following table shows the complete inventory.
The weak pronouns primarily express complements of the verb.
The weak pronouns are either proclitic (appearing immediately before the verb) or enclitic (immediately after).
Enclitic pronouns are used with infinitives, gerunds, and positive imperatives.
With all other forms of the verb, the weak pronouns are proclitic. This includes, in particular, conjugated (finite) verbs and negative imperatives:
In complex verbal constructions consisting of a conjugated verb and an infinitive or gerund, the pronoun can appear either before the first verb or after the second verb.
Use of weak pronouns varies significantly across the Catalan linguistic area.[1]
Northern Catalan (particularly as spoken in Northern Catalonia) and the Balearic dialect do not generally use the reinforced forms (e.g. te veig instead of et veig).[1]
In the imperative mood in Northern Catalan, the reduced form of the pronoun is replaced by a tonic form (thus, not strictly being a weak pronoun anymore). For example, mira'm! (en: look at me!) in Northern Catalan is rendered as mira-mé!.
When two weak pronouns appear with the same verb, they must appear in a fixed order, as illustrated in the following table:
The two pronouns must be selected from different columns, and furthermore ho cannot combine with en or hi.
All of the combinations allowed in the standard language are given in the following table, which also shows the necessary morpho-phonological and orthographic adjustments. In each cell of the table, the forms are listed in the following order, with the same contextual conditions as explained above for the simple pronouns:
In combinations like es + en, the resulting form, pronounced [sən], could be analyzed either as s' + en or as se + 'n. The orthographic convention in such cases is to place the apostrophe as far to the right as possible: se'n, and not s'en, and similarly for se'ls, me'n, te'm, te'ns, etc. The combination of el/la with en, however, is written l'en, because there is no such pronoun as le that would justify the spelling le'n.
As mentioned above, the combinations ho + hi and ho + en are not allowed in the standard language, and must be avoided, for example by keeping only ho and leaving the other pronoun unexpressed. In some contexts, it is also acceptable to replace ho with el, giving rise to the following combinations:
In the second case, it is also possible to replace the pronoun en with hi:
This substitution of hi for en is also used to express the combination of en (ablative) + en (genitive), since the form *ne'n is not allowed:
Sequences of three pronouns are possible, and generally consist of one of the two-pronoun combinations from the table above, preceded by em, et, ens, us, and most commonly es (the added pronoun must not already appear in the original two-pronoun cluster).[2]
Combinations of four pronouns are very rare:
The linguist Joan Solà presents a progression that culminates in a combination of six weak pronouns:
Combinations of weak pronouns are subject to wide regional and stylistic variation, and in several cases the normative rules presented above do not reflect actual usage.
For example, alongside the transparently derived forms of li + direct object pronoun (el, la, els, les) given in the table above, central Catalan varieties replace li with hi:
Furthermore, the feminine forms can merge phonetically with the masculine forms, i.e. la hi is pronounced like l'hi and les hi like els hi.
Combinations of li with en and ho can also undergo modification:
In more colloquial registers, the plural indirect object pronoun els is realized as els hi, and this extended form is used instead of all combinations of els followed by a 3rd person direct object pronoun:
The elided proclitic forms ens n' and us n' are regularly replaced by the unelided forms ens en and us en before a verb starting with a vowel. For example: