Ya no vive aquí. He doesn’t live here any more.
Nadie quiere estudiar ya. No one wants to study any more.
Yaalso has a variety of rhetorical uses, at times expressing a growing irri-
tation or frustration:
¡Cállate ya! Be quiet!
¡Ya era hora! It’s about time!
¡Ya empezamos! Here we go again!
(b) Although both entoncesand luego can mean ‘then’, they do so in
different ways. Entoncesmeans ‘at that moment’, whereas luegomeans
‘next/afterwards’:
Desde entonces no lo he vuelto a ver.
Since then I haven’t seen him again.
Luego se mudaron a Córdoba.
They later moved to Córdoba.
(c) In Peninsular usage the form recién(from recientemente ‘recently’) is
used exclusively before a past participle, with the meaning of ‘newly’,
‘recently’:
recién casado newly wed recién llegado newly arrived
For Latin American usage of recién, see 30.6.3.9.
Adverbs of degree or quantity
These include indefinite adjectives used as adverbs, such as mucho‘a lot’,
poco‘not much’, demasiado‘too much’, bastante‘enough’ (for which, see
Chapter 9), and the comparative words más‘more’, menos‘less’, tan/tanto
‘so’, ‘so much’ (for which, see Chapter 26).
In addition, this category includes items such as muy‘very’, casi‘almost’,
apenas ‘scarcely’:
Apenas come. He hardly eats anything.
Casi hemos terminado. We have almost finished.
Note: Apenas si ‘scarcely/barely’ is found in literary Spanish: Apenas si se
reconocieron ‘They barely recognized one another’.
7.2.4
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Adverbs not
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